A promising debut that aims high but stumbles.
In his debut novel, Colvin tracks three generations of an African Canadian family hailing from the fictional settlement of Woods Bluff in Nova Scotia, a dizzyingly diverse community founded in the 18th century by itinerant Americans, bold Africans, and rebellious Caribbean blacks.
We enter this world in 1918 alongside Kath Ella Sebolt, a bright young girl who soon earns a scholarship to attend college in Montreal. As she drifts away from Woods Bluff, she gets close to Omar Platt, an exiled African American from Mississippi. Kath eventually becomes pregnant with Omar's son, Little Omar. But with Omar out of the picture, and her life firmly set in Montreal, Kath marries a white man named Timothee, who adopts Little Omar as his own. Renamed Etienne, Little Omar struggles with his racial identity. He becomes an academic, has a son of his own, and moves to Alabama, where he and his son, Warner, must reckon with racial realities and their family history. Colvin's storytelling ranges back and forth in time, unearthing his fictional community's history, examining everything from the uses of baby dolls to cure fevers to the origins of the phrase "You're a lying crow." This results in an exploration of how time and migration can change a family and impact its experience of race, but it can also turn the narrative into a confused jumble of incidents. Important characters like Kiendra, Kath's prankster friend whose antics doom her, are too thinly drawn to have the impact Colvin intends. Meanwhile, time that could be used to round out these characters is spent on detours that don't pay off. Colvin's prose can also plod. A scene in which Kath throws a rock to avenge Kiendra's fate means to stun the reader but mostly frustrates. "The rock descends toward the window, moving and tumbling and cutting....A fraction of an inch before the window pane, the rock's leading edge shakes off the last bit of dust, the last length of spider filament, the last bit of rat's hair..."
A promising debut that aims high but stumbles.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-291372-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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
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