Despite tackling several serious themes, oversimplification takes the bite out of this historical drama.
A post–Civil War YA drama about a teenager who aspires to become a doctor, and his confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan.
In the 1870s, teenager Tom Slocum lives in a small town on the Illinois River and dreams of traveling west in search of adventure; he’s particularly drawn to the idea of getting the opportunity to fight “Indians.” One day, he has a chance encounter with a doctor, Robert Steele, who arrives in town by steamboat from Scotland. An untethered, seemingly wild dog threatens Rachel, the girl whom Tom pines for, and Dr. Steele calmly shoots the dog dead. The owner of the dog, Murphy, a local Klan leader, is enraged by the killing, and no less upset when Dr. Steele protects a former slave, Isaiah, from his aggression. Rachel’s leg is badly wounded from a fall from a horse, and Dr. Steele saves it from amputation by countering the infection with carbolic acid, a foreign technique that’s largely rejected in the United States. Tom eventually helps Dr. Steele operate on a man’s chronically infected arm, and he’s persuaded to pursue a career as a doctor. But when Tom’s father dies, the teenager is sent to an orphanage that discourages education and works him mercilessly. He eventually escapes and reunites with Dr. Steele, who takes him on as an apprentice. Meanwhile, Murphy and his Klansmen terrorize the town; he never forgave Dr. Steele for killing his dog, or for his defense of former slaves, and a climactic showdown seems inevitable. Raffensperger (The Diary of Young Arthur Conan Doyle, 2017, etc.) ambitiously combines a lot of complex elements into a brief novel, including the transformation of the country in the wake of the Civil War, the continued legacy of vicious racism, the immorality of arranged marriage, and the halting progress of medical science in the United States. Dr. Steele emerges as an engagingly contradictory character—educated in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Paris, he’s a model of cosmopolitan refinement and moral progressiveness. However, he’s also tough, hardened by the experience of war, and still considers himself something of a country boy. The principal draw of the book is his influence on Tom. But although the story unfolds briskly, the cast that surrounds Tom and Dr. Steele lacks depth. Of course, it isn’t easy to convert the febrile racism of the evil Murphy into a character with substance, but nevertheless, he’s depicted merely as a depthless scoundrel. Part of what makes the post–Civil War years such a captivating period of study are its endlessly complex moral contours, but Raffensperger only pits good vs. evil—moral enlightenment versus the defense of prejudice. Also, even though this is a relatively short novel, there are still too many gratuitous detours away from the central storyline; for example, one chapter is devoted to Dr. Steele’s reminiscences of romantic companionship in New Orleans—a subplot that could have been excised without any narrative cost.
Despite tackling several serious themes, oversimplification takes the bite out of this historical drama.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-940773-31-5
Page Count: 206
Publisher: History Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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