Nothing especially groundbreaking here, but the author examines familiar issues of racial identity and racism with a subtle...
The grim, penetratingly observed story of a half-black teen and her struggles with racial identity in 1980s America.
Rachel is the daughter of a Danish woman and an African-American GI. When the marriage fails, in part because of lingering damage from an accident that took place before Rachel’s birth and of which she knows nothing, her mother takes Rachel and two younger siblings to live in Chicago. But the odds are stacked against a single mom rearing three small children in poverty while dealing with her alcoholism and an abusive boyfriend. The family’s troubles are exacerbated to the point of disaster by the fact that the bewildered Mor (“that’s mom in Danish,” Rachel explains) doesn’t really grasp the implications of her children’s ambiguous racial status and is not prepared to deal on their behalf with prevailing American notions of what race is. After a horrific tragedy, Rachel goes to live with her paternal grandmother in Portland, Ore., where she is for the first time immersed in black culture and thinks of herself as being contained by, or constrained by, racial categories, prejudices and expectations. Interlaced with Rachel’s story is that of her Chicago neighbor Brick, son of a woman who prostitutes herself for drugs. He witnessed the awful incident that nearly ended Rachel’s life and in the aftermath became the unlikely keeper of a family secret. After years roaming the country as a runaway, he lands in Portland and happens upon Rachel in a coincidence not, perhaps, quite earned. Nonetheless, Durrow’s debut won the 2008 Bellwether Prize for a fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice.
Nothing especially groundbreaking here, but the author examines familiar issues of racial identity and racism with a subtle and unflinching eye.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56512-680-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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