A powerful mosaic of voices combine, in poet and storywriter (Trigger Dance, 1990, etc.) Glancy's first novel, to create a haunting portrait of the Trail of Tears. In 1838, some 13,000 Cherokee Indians were driven at bayonet point from their fertile lands (coveted by white settlers) in several southern states, and compelled to march almost a thousand miles to the Oklahoma Territory, ``toward darkness, toward death,'' forced to leave everything behind. Perhaps a quarter of the tribe (principally the elderly, women, and children) died along the way. Glancy, interweaving first-person narratives by a number of figures, most of them Cherokees, captures the horror of the forced march, much of it made during winter, and the mingled bafflement, anger, despair, and resignation of the Cherokee (who had swiftly adopted farming and European dress, had developed their own written language, and in many cases embraced Christianity). Two voices stand out from the chorus: that of Maritole, a young woman who loses most of her family, including an infant, along the march, and who gradually discovers a stubborn determination within herself to survive; and that of her proud, distant husband Knobowtee, struggling to retain some sense of self. The Cherokee, forced to depart with only the clothes on their backs, suffered horribly in the cold. Those attempting to escape were shackled or shot by the troops guarding them. And while curious whites gathered along the route to watch the tribe pass, few offered food, or blankets, or shelter. ``They called us savages,'' Maritole says of those who watch. ``Then it was all right to drive us from our land. Then it was all right to sit along the road and watch the spectacle of our march.'' Those who reached Oklahoma were abandoned without shelter or supplies. The voices that comprise the narrative are vigorous, and the period details convincing but not obtrusive. A distinctly original and haunting work of historical fiction.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100225-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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