A slim but often effective coming-of-age story set in a Micronesia of long ago.
Knight delves deeper into the origin story of his heroic Micronesian mariner in this third historical novel in a series.
Before his Odysseus-like sea journeys began, Ḷainjin was an infant in the arms of his surrogate mother, Helkena, on the storm-swept rocks of Wōtto Atoll in the Rālik island chain (now part of the Marshall Islands). As this story opens, his birth mother, the trader Tarmālu, has just departed the atoll with her sailors, hoping to move their fleet of canoes out of the path of a typhoon. The storm arrives and destroys Helkena’s house, but she and the baby manage to survive by taking shelter in a tree. Tarmālu doesn’t return after the storm, and Helkena is unsure of her fate; the latter does receive two visitors from Tarmālu’s native island of Naṃdik, however—one of whom is Japeba, the grandfather of the baby Ḷainjin. The men want to raise Ḷainjin on Naṃdik, and they want Helkena to come and help them. She agrees, hoping that, while she’s there, she can get her “lines”—the traditional tattoos of mature women—as well as a husband to bring back with her to Wōtto. Helkena is already a mother of sorts, but she’s about to embark on a journey through the complex, environment-dictated customs of Rālik womanhood. Knight’s prose is even and evocative, speckled with Rālik words that effectively help to shape the world of the novel: “The old mariner claimed he felt the island’s presence in a swell called buñtokiōñ, which fell from the north. He spent quite a bit of time trying to point it out to [Helkena], but its presence was too subtle for her to detect.” Knight’s interests are perhaps more anthropological than they are literary, but his fictional world is so immersive that readers won’t mind the relative flatness of the characters. It’s a short novel, barely longer than a novella, but the landscapes it inhabits are epic in scale.
A slim but often effective coming-of-age story set in a Micronesia of long ago.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77180-586-5
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Iguana Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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