Featuring a spirited protagonist, this compelling mix of the historical and the supernatural will resonate.
On the eve of the Civil War, an enslaved Black teen awakens her sister’s ghost and embarks on a dangerous journey to freedom in this debut novel.
For 16-year-old Junie, the cotton plantation of Bellereine in Lowndes County, Alabama, is the only home she’s known. In the summer of 1860, the enslaved teenager spends her days working as a house servant with her bossy cousin, Bess, and tending to the needs of Violet McQueen, the redheaded only daughter of the plantation’s white owners. Junie illicitly wanders the local woods at night, mourning her recently deceased older sister, Minnie. It was Minnie who had tried to curb Junie’s carefree spirit, which was a source of tension among older relatives fearful of drawing unwanted attention from the master. The arrival of the wealthy Taylor siblings from Louisiana suggests the possibility of a match for Violet and exile for Junie as Violet’s maid. To avoid this catastrophe, Junie commits a desperate act that raises Minnie’s ghost from the grave and propels Junie down a dangerous path toward liberation. Drawing on her own family’s history as outlined in a note at the end of the book, Eckstine offers a compelling portrait of the psychological, emotional, and social degradations of slavery. If Junie is naive about her status in the novel’s early chapters, she grows determined and resilient as she realizes the true nature of her “friendship” with Violet and the impossibility of her life as an enslaved person on the plantation. Clunkers (characters “smirk” at least nine times) and anachronistic language (Violet curses like a sailor) occasionally mar the lush prose, but Eckstine is a talented writer to watch.
Featuring a spirited protagonist, this compelling mix of the historical and the supernatural will resonate.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593725115
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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 welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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