If Stevie Wonder is correct, when you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer. Kent’s novel validates his...
A battle between belief systems in rural 19th-century Ireland forms the backdrop for Kent’s (Burial Rites, 2013) unblinking examination of the corrosive costs of poverty and ignorance.
Nóra Leahy becomes the object of gossip and speculation in the rural Irish valley she inhabits after the 1825 death of her laborer husband, Martin. Nóra’s desperate attempts to hide from her neighbors the existence of the severely disabled grandson who came into her care after the death of his own mother—Nóra’s beloved daughter, Johanna—soon come undone, and Micheál’s presence in the valley becomes the focal point of the malignant attentions of her fellow valley-dwellers, who are seeking an answer and anodyne for a reversal in fortunes that has beset the area. Long-standing belief in the destructive powers of “the Good People,” fairylike creatures whose motives and methods are the subject of endless speculation in Nóra’s agrarian community, leads to hostility against Micheál, who is suspected of being a “changeling,” substituted by the Good People in place of Nóra’s actual grandson. Nóra’s frantic efforts to recover the happy boy she comes to believe was spirited away by the Good People—who seem also to have visited new plagues and poverty on the valley—are aided by Nance, a grizzled, mysterious woman reputed to know the ways of the frequently malevolent beings, and Mary, a softhearted young household maid. A nerve-wracking series of efforts to banish the creature thought to be masquerading as Micheál illuminates the clash between traditional values and ways of life clung to in the valley and newly emerging beliefs in science—and perhaps a different brand of superstition—encouraged by clergy, the more educated, and residents of a nearby city that seems worlds away. Kent’s well-researched tale is inspired by newspaper reports of an actual attempt in 19th-century Ireland to banish a changeling. Peppered with Gaelic words and phrases and frequent references to bygone beliefs and practices, this brutal telling of a brutal story invites discussion and revulsion.
If Stevie Wonder is correct, when you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer. Kent’s novel validates his indictment of superstition.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-24396-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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