Romain’s emotional tale brings the interior worlds of its female characters to life.
An arresting novel about tightly wound secrets and the art of letting go of them.
Callie Quinn is a mild-mannered translator working out of Guanajuato, Mexico. Her life is one of order and lists, and Romain (Thinking Things Through, 1996) populates it with colorful characters, including Armando Torres, a closeted gay drummer in an orchestra to whom she teaches French. A mission to recover Armando’s dog, Tavelé, eventually forces Callie to recall a long-buried secret. Armando is convinced that Pamela Fischer, a new trumpeter in the orchestra, has stolen his dog and encourages Callie to go undercover as Pamela’s new trumpet student to investigate. Armando’s overwrought behavior toes the line of believability, but his charm and childlike nature contrast well with Callie’s seriousness, making for an amusing, if sometimes-tense, dynamic. It turns out that Pamela, a black woman, was adopted, and Callie knows something of the sadness that permeates her music. As a white girl growing up in segregated Missouri in the 1960s, Callie was quiet and studious and sang in her church choir. Later, she met Noah, a young black man from a Kansas City church. Noah’s family expected him to become a “leader in [their] community” and settle down with “a respectable Negro woman.” Then Callie became pregnant with his child. In the present, when Callie’s mother comes to visit, the neatly stacked obfuscations of Callie’s life threaten to topple. Through evenly dispersed flashbacks, Romain clearly renders the complex racial dynamics of the times in which the characters lived. The novel sometimes edges toward melodrama, but the author’s generous explorations of the Guanajuato landscape and the backgrounds of her secondary characters help to round out a subtle, satisfying story.
Romain’s emotional tale brings the interior worlds of its female characters to life.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-598-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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