A tender but somewhat cloying romantic tale.
In this early-20th-century drama, a teenager sets off in search of her long-lost mother.
In 1906, Ida Roeder is nearly killed in an earthquake in San Francisco. She’s separated from her husband and daughter and suffers from amnesia but is cared for by an altruistic stranger, Jamie. She moves with him to Idaho, takes on the name Liz—she can’t recall her own—and only remembers her former life in hazy scraps. Meanwhile, her husband, Bruno, who has believed her dead for five years, leaves New Mexico for Idaho when he discovers evidence she’s alive. Emma, Ida and Bruno’s 15-year-old daughter, exasperated she is left behind, decamps for Idaho on her own. Two of her best friends, Juan and Wolfe, join her on the journey, each harboring his own unexpressed romantic devotion to her, touchingly captured by Haag (Gone to Texas, 2016). Emma learns that her father is badly injured in an accident and has drifted into a coma. She rushes to be by his side, where she encounters Liz, who’s drawn to Bruno for reasons she’s still unprepared to fully fathom. And Jamie, who suspects that Bruno is her husband, moves him into his own home for medical care despite the deep love he feels for Liz. Jamie’s best friend, Dillon, warns him that he’s setting himself up for inevitable heartache, but he also becomes enchanted by Liz. His affection pits him against Jamie as a romantic rival. This second installment in the New Mexico Gal series is a complex but emotionally affecting family story. Haag artfully weaves together several romantically charged plotlines, and the tale hustles forward at a lively pace. But she tries to cram too much into a short novel, and those entanglements can feel frivolously soap-operatic. In addition, the prose can be torturously earnest. At one point, Jamie muses about Liz: “How old might the lady be? he wondered. Perhaps younger by a couple of years, judging from her firm and desirable body. Hey, wait a minute, his brain said. Are you lusting? No! You can’t be, his inner voice answered.”
A tender but somewhat cloying romantic tale.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4808-4624-1
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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