The Revolutionary War serves as a seldom-seen but solid foundation for Canadian-born Glover's (The South Will Rise at Noon, 1989, etc.) latest—a foray into some of the conflicting impulses and perspectives swirling through that formative period. Based in part on the actual experiences of Captain Hendrick Nellis, a Tory who fought against his American neighbors, the story emerges equally from Hendrick's exploits, the actions of his son, whom he kidnaps and forces to join his side, and from the strange adventures of a German girl who witnesses her family's slaughter by Indians and is almost killed herself, but who survives to become a feared medicine woman. Hendrick's son Oskar, a confused youth with a passion for writing, pens unsolicited secret reports to General Washington on elm bark even after taking up arms against the Americans. Adopting native ways himself as a leader of an Iroquois troop, his frenzy and lust are unabated in combat until he's shot by his cousin and suffers the loss of his closest friend to friendly fire. Meanwhile, Mary Hunsacker begins a new life among her captors, taking up with her assailant and living in the community until he dies on the warpath and she is abandoned for being too white in her grief. Hendrick's own mental state is extremely fragile; he suffers from increasingly severe migraines and depression as the war goes against the British, and in response slowly bleeds himself to the point of death. He brings Mary back to the white world, where she restores Oskar to health—but all of them continue to exist on the fine edge of madness, their lives utterly ruined by upheaval and loss. Darkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless in its patterning of voices and imagery, this is a close study of individuals trapped by a world in flux: a chaotic view of a new world order from the standpoint of the losers.
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41573-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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