Three brothers, three very different lives.
Henpecked husband and have-it-all buppie Clifford Matthews is traveling home to Pittsburgh from Disney World with Demetria and their two young sons when Demetria announces that she wants a divorce. Clifford is too stunned to do much more than gape—and remember that his younger brother Victor always said Demetria took advantage of him. Victor, the most streetwise of the three, has problems of his own. Lynette, the mother of his baby daughter Jewel, rarely lets him see the child—even though he caught Lynette having sex with her new lover right in front of the baby. Victor, a champion booty-chaser with nothing much else goin’ on, rails against a family court system he thinks is rigged against black fathers, and he warns that Clifford is about to get royally screwed. Nathan, brother three and a priggish minister, counsels patience and prayer, even though he knows he’s spending too much time with a troubled (and luscious) church sister who has marital problems of her own. Nathan practically worships his own wife Brenda—which doesn’t keep him from one-on-one counseling sessions with Beverly, who’s coming on strong. Eventually, Demetria kicks Clifford out, and Clifford takes Victor’s advice and consults a lawyer: strong-minded Alojuwa Bell. More than anything, he doesn’t want his boys to grow up fatherless the way he did. Alojuwa does what she can, but not before she lets him know how much a custody fight will hurt his kids. Then Clifford hears from Brenda that his brother Nathan has strayed from the path of righteousness. At least Clifford knows he’s doing the right thing. Divorcing Demetria may be an expensive humiliation, but it’s what she wants, and his sons will be sure of his love.
A first novel that’s anything but fresh, its points of view exclusively male and for the most part seemingly misogynistic.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44596-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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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
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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