A thin and dreamy but accessible parable of a man coming to religious awareness.
A man searches for God in Wehmeyer’s Christian-inflected novel in verse.
In the year 1425, a serf feels the urge to walk away from the brickyard where he works, carrying nothing but a hickory staff, a satchel, and the clothes on his back. He travels without any particular aim, meeting people and seeing sights he doesn’t understand. What does a washerwoman mean when she tells him that “a journey is a container”? Why did a puppeteer at the crossroads compare him to one of his marionettes? He may not know the answers, but these interactions have the man asking progressively bigger questions. Eventually, he decides he must find God, which turns out to be easier said than done: “ ‘To walk toward God,’ the brewer explained, ‘you walk toward understanding and compassion.’ / ‘But I don’t understand anything!’ / ‘What you say is true,’ said the brewer, / ‘That is a good beginning.’ ” As the protagonist wanders, questions, and learns, he hopes that he’s nearing the end of his quest. Little does he know that an ending is just another beginning. Wehmeyer relates the pilgrim’s story over the course of 86 poem-length chapters, each broken into lines and stanzas: “In front of a letter writer’s shop / there was a man / reading a large book. / He asked, “What are you reading?’ / ‘A treasure book,’ was the reply. / ‘What is the treasure book named?’ / ‘The book of many books.’ ” The author cites the ancient Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers as an inspiration for the novel’s format, and there’s certainly a meditative, self-contained quality to each chapter even as they successfully build on each other to form a larger narrative. The Christian themes aren’t subtle, precisely, but neither are they overly dogmatic in their presentation. Fans of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923) and similar works of bare-bones philosophy will be likely to enjoy Wehmeyer’s take on Christianity’s teachings.
A thin and dreamy but accessible parable of a man coming to religious awareness.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 9781664245303
Page Count: 144
Publisher: WestBowPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2022
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
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.
The true story of Axis diplomats detained in the U.S. at the start of World War II is transformed into a dazzling historical novel set at a sumptuous West Virginia hotel.
Bestselling YA fantasy author Stiefvater’s adult debut introduces a writer whose prodigious imagination and distinctive prose style have combined to create a novel that will remind readers of why they fell in love with reading in the first place. At its center is the captivating June Hudson, an erstwhile Appalachian orphan who was taken in by the wealthy Gilfoyle family, owners of the Avallon Hotel & Spa, a high-society retreat built over underground mineral springs. At his death, the patriarch bequeathed ownership to his playboy son, Edgar, but made June the general manager, as she had spent her life learning the business—and also shared with Gilfoyle Sr. a rare gift relating to the “sweetwater” springs, a fantastical element of this otherwise realistic novel. Aside from the magical waters and a few other fanciful details, Stiefvater’s fictional world is based on extensive research into high-end hotels of the period, creating a version of luxury so appealing that readers will wish they could check into the Avallon and stay on indefinitely. In fact, the novel revolves around the true meaning of luxury. To June, it has nothing to do with wealth; it is more connected to joy, and to the book’s title: “June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury.” Also brilliantly managed is the rest of the ensemble cast: sexy FBI agents; June’s inimitable staff; the delegations of Japanese, Germans, and Italians detained at the hotel, some quite nasty, but among them a strange, special, totally silent child. And on top of all this, a delicious love story!
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593655504
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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