A creatively embellished, if uneven, tale of an Irish family’s odyssey.
This debut historical novel charts an Irish family’s passage to America during the Great Famine.
In 1848, the Bodkin family set sail from Galway, Ireland, to New York City on a ship named the Cushlamachree. Reflecting on his family history, the author remarks that his book “relates what I have imagined about the Bodkins’ lives between 1848 and 1902, sewn together with places, names, and dates I have found to be factual.” The story opens with Martin, age “sixty-plus-six,” recalling his family’s life in Briarhill, a Galway “townland,” prior to the clan’s immigration. The narrative then switches to Dominic, Martin’s brother, an esteemed doctor and first-class passenger on his return voyage to America in 1894. Bodkin then skips back to describe Martin, Dominic, and their siblings boarding the “coffin ship” with their parents to first set foot in the New World. The author focuses predominantly on Dominic and his medical career after he became an Army nurse during the Civil War and Martin, a veteran of the same campaign who finds works as an ironmonger in Brooklyn. The tale describes the family navigating trauma and prejudice to find a foothold in America. Bodkin delights in capturing the atmosphere of a location and establishing a strong sense of place. Describing summer in Brooklyn, he notes: “Boys played games in the streets without shirts; mothers sat in the shade, waving fans near their faces; businessmen walking to and from offices took off their jackets.” The author also introduces meticulously detailed characters, creating a rich backstory for each. The tale of Nora Jones, who as a child is found in a curragh alongside her dead father and travels to America with the Bodkins, is particularly stirring. But while substantial background information is offered for female characters, the emphasis remains on male achievement. The narrative would have benefited from stronger, more believable female voices. In addition, Bodkin’s dialogue is often too on the nose, communicating facts in a dry, unrealistic manner. At one point, a character asserts: “It was only my grandfather who left for Newfoundland in 1780. As a young man, he left his parents to sail from Dublin to Newfoundland.” This novel captures the author’s family history with clarity, but sadly its flaws prevent it from truly standing out from similar titles.
A creatively embellished, if uneven, tale of an Irish family’s odyssey.Pub Date: March 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73637-872-4
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2022
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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