A deeply emotional historical novel tackling race and queerness in early-20th-century America.
In Stuart’s historical novel, a Black man in segregated Kentucky cares for the white daughter of the family for whom he works.
In the 1930s in the town of Horse Cave, Black residents live in the neighborhood of Kingdom, across the train tracks from white townspeople. Paul Carew, the son of Baptist preacher Elijah, spends his time with his neighbor and best friend, Moses Daniels, or helping his mother, Lily, cook, clean, and care for his younger siblings. Elijah is tough on Paul, berating his “delicate” gender expression, while Paul despises Elijah for not helping Lily with any of her work around the house. One day, while his family is participating in church-related events, Paul sneaks home to put on one of Lily’s dresses and her makeup. While he’s dancing alone, Elijah surprises him and becomes enraged, stripping Paul and beating him with his belt before Lily arrives home and intervenes. Paul’s life changes drastically when his cousin Lorene, who works for a wealthy white family, gets him a job alongside her to keep him away from Elijah’s anger. Sally and Walter Jackson hire him to cook with Lorene and work in Sally’s garden. When the Jacksons welcome a new granddaughter, Jane, Paul is given the responsibility to care for the child, sending the protagonist on an emotional journey that takes a turn during D-Day on June 6, 1944. Throughout Stuart’s novel, Paul effectively grapples with gender identity and with his unorthodox connections to whiteness and privilege through his position with the Jackson family. In author’s notes, Stuart, who is white, and Flower, a Black author, tell of how they came to co-write the story, and Stuart reveals that the novel offers a version of her own life, employing fictionalized aspects to tell the story from the main character’s distinct point of view. The authors imbue Paul’s voice with emotion and grace, crafting a moving story of a courageous person in a difficult time.
A deeply emotional historical novel tackling race and queerness in early-20th-century America.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781736458310
Page Count: 376
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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