Within this book is an excellent novel that would have been stronger with a less complicated treatment.
The real-life crash of a charter plane full of Atlanta's white elite is the inspiration for a fictional examination of race, class, love, and betrayal.
In the summer of 1962, more than 100 Atlanta art lovers were about to return from their junket to the great museums of Italy and France when their jet crashed during takeoff at Orly. The only member of the tour group who didn't perish was Raif Bentley, who took a slightly later plane because he and his wife, parents of three, had a policy of never flying together. In Pittard's (Listen to Me, 2016, etc.) re-imagination of the aftermath of this disaster, Raif returns home to an emotionally ravaged world. His good friends Robert and Lily Tucker, a couple expecting their first child, have lost both of Lily's parents, and Robert, an editor at the Atlanta Journal, has lost his young mistress, a writer from the paper whom he sent to cover the trip. So devastated is he that he walks out on pregnant Lucy that very day and goes into a messy, booze-soaked free fall. The Tuckers' separate perspectives on what happens after that are two of several angles among which the narration rotates. People who have no connection to the crash—Piedmont Dobbs, a 19-year-old African-American who's just left home, and Anastasia Rivers, an opportunistic white beauty who does exhibition diving at a hotel—enter the story as it becomes a study of the effect of privilege on relationships in Atlanta, circa 1962. Some of the angles are more gripping and believable than others; in particular, the engrossing and moving plotline involving Piedmont carries the book and makes some of the rest of it seem rather thin. By the time the novel climaxes at a Fourth of July party held in an over-the-top mansion built on the site of a lynching, one can't help but notice that the plane crash is actually pretty tangential to its main concerns.
Within this book is an excellent novel that would have been stronger with a less complicated treatment.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-74806-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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