An affecting, nuanced, and provocative look at racial bias.
In this novel, a famous African American jazz singer confronts her complex past while her son grapples with his own deeply rooted anti-Semitism.
Georgina Phillips escapes the pervasive racism of Alabama and an orphanage in Atlanta when she is adopted by a Quaker couple in Philadelphia, a move that literally saves her life. A talented singer, she pursues a musical career in Amsterdam and joins an up-and-coming band led by saxophone player Benny Buchalter. Georgina and Benny strike up a torrid affair and fall deeply in love, though his professional vanity—he sees himself as a “jealous beast”—ensures their union is a tumultuous one. Charles Wythe, another member of the band, also pines for Georgina, but he doesn’t seem to be a serious rival to Benny. The real problem for Benny and Georgina is more political than personal—it’s 1938, and the Nazis are threatening the whole of Europe. Neither Georgina, a Black woman, nor Benny, a Polish Jew, is safe, a point brought home powerfully when he discovers his entire family has been killed. Benny compels Charles to promise to help Georgina flee Amsterdam if the situation becomes too dire, which is precisely what transpires. Fast-forward several decades, and Georgina lives in the United States and has enjoyed a storied career as a jazz singer, once called a “national treasure” by the president of the United States. At the age of 80, she lives happily with Charles, now her husband and a musician in New York City. But they both suddenly hear from Benny—they didn't even know he was alive. They’re excited to be reunited with him, though Charles frets anxiously about what it means for his marriage and is crushed by guilt over the possibility he betrayed Benny. Meanwhile, Georgina’s son, David, wrestles with his own demons, unable to shake a persistent distrust of Jews, an angry bias delicately portrayed by Holtzman, who creates a poignant parallel to Georgina’s incongruent experience.
The author’s tale is a complex one but never tediously baroque—despite the plot’s intricacies and shifts in time, readers will never be confused and will always be engrossed. The distance between David’s and his parents’ experiences with Jews is a striking one. Exercising great authorial restraint, Holtzman presents it without an excess of commentary, allowing readers space for philosophical interpretations. And while David concedes his prejudice is “crazy,” it is nevertheless one he cannot shake: “The sticking negative in David’s mind was an innate belief that Jews took advantage of Black people. This was based on history; all the stories he’d been told, of how Georgina had been repeatedly lied to and cheated by promoters, producers, and club owners who were almost always Jewish.” The author’s prose can be a bit uneven and imprecise—for example, the aforementioned quotation describes David’s bias as “innate” but then contradictorily as a function of experience. But this is a minor editorial quibble and one that doesn’t undermine the novel’s emotional strength.
An affecting, nuanced, and provocative look at racial bias.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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