Perfectly captures a time of epic change. An exceptional work of Southern fiction.
A middle-aged New York columnist re-explores a personal tragedy that occurred during the Civil Rights era.
The son of Judge Mitchell Ransom has been in New York for some time, a rising star in the newspaper business. Yet Carter Ransom is going home to Troy, Miss. Four people died in a church bombing in 1965, among them the love of Carter’s life. Now roughly 30 years later, the ghosts of Mississippi are awakened once again. Marlette (The Bridge, 2001), a Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist, blends the events leading up to the original bombing with the modern-day trial of a Klan leader who may have ordered the attack. Using an intriguing cast of characters past and present, Marlette sets the stage for an intricate story of love, struggle and terror. The past unfolds as if the reader were sharing the moment. Change is in the air, but so is fear. Carter’s best friend, Elijah Knight, is leading the drive to register black voters. Unable to handle the rigidity of law school and the shadow of his father, Carter is adrift. Sarah Solomon, a Barnard girl from New York, has joined the movement. She and Carter first meet at Magic Time, a legendary blues joint long faded into the overgrown honeysuckle. Two young people believe they can change the world. It is a poignant and beautiful courtship, but it ends in tragedy. Marlette uses Carter’s past experience to explore similar tension in the modern world. There is unrest in New York following a terrorist attack. Questions arise about Mitchell Ransom’s actions in the 1965 bombing trial. Carter finds himself questioning all that has ever mattered to him. For a news columnist from New York, the only way to confront the demons of the past is to force them to speak. Marlette sets a harmonic tone, both glorious and deeply moving.
Perfectly captures a time of epic change. An exceptional work of Southern fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-20001-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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