Many good moments here, and some wonderfully empathetic characterizations, but they don’t add up to anything like a unified...
A heartfelt, though oddly shaped, second novel from the other Joanna Scott, whose writings about the collision of Eastern and Western cultures include both nonfiction and her well-received novel, Charlie and the Children (1997).
The arresting opening pages here efficiently dramatize the uneasy assimilation to their new home (in America) of its unnamed narrator’s three adopted children: South Korean siblings whose heritage and early life she then imagines into a fully fledged narrative. It’s focused at first on their mother Mi Sook, herself a foundling raised by successive owners of the eponymous shop (which offers richly decorated gourds as good-luck charms), and by the naïve second wife of a much older man. He is Kun Soo, a laborer and truckdriver eager to shed the wife who had borne him “only” a houseful of daughters and a single brain-damaged son. Scott’s detailed pictures of Korean village and city life are fascinating, and her patient analysis of Kun Soo’s slow decline (following his first wife’s death, and his troubled marriage to Mi Sook) skillfully draws the reader in. The nexus of rigid role expectations, peasant superstition, and aggrieved male pride that drive her to fantasies of adultery and him to fateful inarticulate rage are consistently dramatic and absorbing. Unfortunately, the lengthy dénouement—in which Kun Soo’s stoical elderly mother furtively yet firmly takes control of her grandchildren’s welfare—reads more like message than fiction, and diffuses the force of the much richer (if likewise generic) conflict at the book’s core. Scott tacks on a brief history of Mi Sook’s unhappy afterthought-romance with an American soldier, and her son Dae Young’s narrow escape from a life of crime. But these feel like starting-points for a novel she hasn’t written. And the story simply, abruptly ends, without further reference to the frame in which it is seemingly presented.
Many good moments here, and some wonderfully empathetic characterizations, but they don’t add up to anything like a unified whole.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2000
ISBN: 1-878448-01-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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