In Spann’s debut historical novel, an extended family finds a home in California and Kansas in the decade following the Civil War.
Belle Pettifaux is comfortable in her role as the young daughter of a Louisville physician. Unfortunately, the onset of the Civil War disrupts Belle’s world, sending her father and Samuel J., her sweetheart, into the Confederate army. When her mother dies, teenage Belle is sent from Louisville to Kansas to live with an aunt. She befriends local farm boy Earle Johnson—despite his suspicions about her Rebel ways—beginning a connection between the Johnson and Pettifaux families that deepens after the war ends, as Belle’s father marries Earle’s widowed mother, Earle marries Belle’s best friend, and Belle is reunited with Samuel J. At the close of the 1860s, financial troubles send half the family to California, and after overcoming numerous challenges, Belle reunites with her family’s former slave and discovers her calling as an opera singer. The book features period photographs captioned with the names of individuals and places in the story, leaving the reader to wonder whether the novel has a historical basis. Spann presents some engaging characters and develops them over the course of the narrative, but her decision to shift the narration from one character to another becomes confusing at times. The phonetic rendering of Southern speech is often taken to extremes, particularly when African-American characters speak: “Did y’all dance everee dance, Mizz Bayelle? Waz it fine? Ah talked to the drivers, everee laydee was plum cited.” A few minor but noticeable historical implausibilities (a 5-acre kitchen garden, a Kansas native who identifies as a Southern lady, etc.) might distract historical-fiction enthusiasts, but the story will still appeal to readers looking for a new perspective on the United States after the Civil War.
A novel of 19th-century America driven by strong characters but hampered by narrative and historical shortcomings.
Pub Date: June 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493784240
Page Count: 154
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2014
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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