A darkly immersive coming-of-age story set on the hazardous coast of Cornwall.
Baker brings the world of the 19th-century wrecking industry to life in this historical novel.
The village of St. Rose in Cornwall, England, sustains itself on a peculiar trade: salvage. The law says that when a ship smashes on the treacherous rocks off the coast, whoever can grab its contents, either from the sea or from the shore, is the new rightful owner—if everyone aboard the ship is dead. This leads to macabre practices, even by children, such as 14-year-old Hannah Pendarves and her younger siblings, who find a still-living man on the beach and promptly bash in his head so they can loot his pockets. Only later does Hannah learn that dead man hadn’t been swept in from a ship at all, but was a gentleman of some importance whose murder is of interest to the constable. The teen feels no guilt for taking the man’s life—she views anyone not from St. Rose as a “foreigner” and therefore undeserving of empathy—but she’d prefer not to bring the eyes of the law on wreckers’ work. When Hannah’s father, salvager Hap Pendarves, is convinced by his new wife to get Hannah out of the house, he places his daughter as a servant (and spy) in the home of Falmouth shipping agent, Francis Keverne, who turns out to be related to the man she murdered. Hannah’s time outside the community of St. Rose soon has her wondering if the kill-and-steal ethic is really the best way to live. Over the course of this novel, Baker masterfully recreates the salt and grit of the period. This extend to the wreckers’ dialect, which is generally clear and straightforward, if occasionally confusing: “Tain’t that,” Hannah says, expressing her father’s intention to wed a local widow. “The Widdy Chegwidden is out of mourning today. He’s after marrying she.” Most impressive, though, is the author’s rendering of the violent, clannish culture of the Cornwall wreckers, which, over the course of Hannah’s journey, is engagingly portrayed from both the outside and inside.
A darkly immersive coming-of-age story set on the hazardous coast of Cornwall.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781778066382
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Stories All the Way Down
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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