A tale for readers intrigued by the intersecting lives of hard-luck cases.
Harris (A Bottle of Rain, 2007, etc.) delivers a literary novel about a number of ramshackle characters based in modern-day Florida
Stephanie, who recently shot her husband, is on a Greyhound bus to Florida. She strikes up a conversation with a man named Jeremiah, and it’s not long before she’s on her way to his trailer-park home in Daytona Beach. There, she meets Jeremiah’s friend, a physically misshapen, frequently excited man known as Charley Younger, and thinks the following to herself: “That boy had no chin and his ears were weird and his eyes were barely open. Retarded!” After she settles into a new life with her newfound companions, the cast of characters expands to include all sorts of sun-tanned, bottomed-out, chain-smoking, drinking, fishing, and often lonely people. All of them, for some reason or another, find themselves in an area where Ponce de Léon once searched for the fabled Fountain of Youth. Readers follow along as Stephanie, and those in similar straits, do their best to go about their lives no matter how tragic, flawed, or broken they are. For example, readers are told of one young woman, just down from New York City and staying in her boss’s time-share: “This would be a long dark decline that, regardless, would not end well. She just knew it.” The question becomes just what will happen to these people, stuck in this smoldering ashtray of America. In this bleak, entertaining novel, surprises are frequent; just when readers think that they know exactly what’s going to happen next, it turns out that they don’t. Changes come, not only in geography, but also in the characters’ redemptive qualities. Some of the individuals’ broad statements, however, are questionable, even cringe-worthy (such as an assertion that “Guilt drove everything. Drove you everywhere like an evil chauffeur”). However, the book’s descriptions, no matter how crude, prove more memorable; for instance, one woman is said to be an “erotic armadillo,” while another’s nipples poke through her tank top “like thorns.” If the whole setup appears crass, that’s because it is; the focus isn’t on yacht clubs and beachfront condominiums, but on more meager figures who, in spite of it all, manage to survive—or not.
A tale for readers intrigued by the intersecting lives of hard-luck cases.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60489-163-8
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2016
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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