More reflective and sentimental than adventurous; a quick read that includes some historically intriguing maritime details.
In 1757, a group of Irish immigrants spends two months crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard the sailing ship The Royal Duchess, heading for Virginia with hopes for a better future.
Long’s debut historical novel recounts the trans-Atlantic passage of John Holmes and his brother Robert, who leave their Presbyterian family—and the poverty and religious discrimination of Ireland—for the “opportunity to own land, and prosper, and most especially worship God in our own way without restriction or government interference in our lives.” It is an excited band of passengers on this mostly joyful crossing to the English Colonies. Children romp on the deck of the vessel, and the captain, Michael Mears, is committed to making the journey as pleasant as possible, even organizing dancing on Saturday evenings to keep up morale. Most of the passengers purchased their tickets, but some, like 17-year-old Matilda Magruder, agreed to several years of indentured servitude in the Colonies as payment for the voyage. Matilda’s parents and siblings are also onboard, but they could not afford a ticket for her. John, having a degree from the University of Dublin, is looking forward to a career in teaching, and Robert anticipates opening a woodworking business. John is the enthusiastic narrator of this feel-good tale, which is a series of vignettes describing the mostly amiable daily encounters and experiences onboard The Royal Duchess. Along the way, Long paints a rich portrait of life at sea in the 18th century. Sleeping quarters are tight, and food is carefully rationed to last the two-month voyage, but there are few complaints: “A staple diet of mush or flapjacks, fish, jerky, mutton and hard biscuits; and a few apples or oranges to prevent scurvy would keep the passengers fed.” Despite one death due to illness, one frightening confrontation with a hurricane, and a collision with a whale, the tone of the prose, conveying an Irish lilt, is decidedly upbeat. But with the exception of a few action scenes (for example, during the storm), readers are likely to find their attention wandering because of a lack of narrative conflict.
More reflective and sentimental than adventurous; a quick read that includes some historically intriguing maritime details.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5485-3
Page Count: 132
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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