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AT THE FULL AND CHANGE OF THE MOON

Name: AT THE FULL AND CHANGE OF THE MOON
Author: Dionne Brand
ISBN: 0-8021-1649-3

by Dionne Brand ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1999

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A poetic, loosely plotted tale beginning with an 1824 slave revolt in Trinidad. Herself born in Trinidad (though she now lives in Canada), second-novelist Brand (In Another Place, Not Here, 1997) vividly captures the essence of slavery in the leg irons clapped on Marie-Ursule, the witchy queen of a secret society of slaves. The shackles do physical damage, but their true harm is spiritual, for to be whole Marie-Ursule must be free. By the time the irons are removed, she has gone a little mad. She leads her “regiment” in a final act of defiance, mass suicide, which so distresses the British Admiralty that in another ten years it grudgingly frees the slaves. Marie-Ursule becomes a heroine of the island, both a curse and a great example to her progeny. First among these is Bola, the daughter Marie-Ursule could not bear to take with her to the grave, who lives well into the 20th century. Bola is barely parented by her distraught and often-absent father; she raises herself, becoming an absentminded figure who sits by the rocks of her tiny inlet, Culebra, watching whales and seducing men. No man sticks around, but Bola begets myriad children and grandchildren, who in turn raise themselves and wander the world from nearby Venezuela to Holland, Israel, and Canada. There’s the unpriestly Priest, who becomes a junkie and a gangster in the States; and the intriguing Samuel, of Indian and Trinidadian descent, who wants to fight for England and yet is relegated to hard labor because of his skin color. Finally, there is a modern Bola, a woman living in Culebra, in the family house, searching for an identity. Alice Walker with a Caribbean flavor and believable men: a sort of dream of history.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-8021-1649-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SALVAGE
by Dionne Brand

- BOOK REVIEW
IN ANOTHER PLACE, NOT HERE
by Dionne Brand

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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.