Fictional characters serve mainly as mouthpieces for an admittedly noble mission (portions of the novel’s proceeds will...
The daughter of a troubled Vietnam veteran fulfills her late father’s vow to found a center for homeless children in Saigon.
Iris, a Chicago book reviewer, journeys to the metropolis now officially known as Ho Chi Minh City to complete work on the shelter/school/orphanage, set to open in a month. She’s accompanied by former neighbor Noah, an Iraq war veteran maimed by an IED in Baghdad. His mother has begged Iris to take Noah along, hoping the trip will wean him from the heavy drinking mixed with painkillers he relies on to blunt his anger at the pointless conflict that cost him a leg. Thien, a young Vietnamese woman employed by the center, intuits that Noah can best heal by focusing on helping others, and there are certainly plenty of street children who need aid. Sahn, a beat cop who has hated Americans since he fought against them during the war, needles Iris for protection money; he knows that once his failing eyesight is discovered, his policing career will be over. Though Sahn is corrupt, he and Iris cooperate to shelter Tam, a seven-year-old suffering from leukemia. In the novel’s most riveting sections, an abandoned boy and girl, Minh and Mai, have been enslaved by petty gangster Loc, who cut off Minh’s hand to enhance his beggarly appeal. Mai sells fans, and Minh wallops tourists in games of Connect Four; their earnings go directly into Loc’s opium pipe. The rescue of Mai and Minh belatedly transforms the book into a thriller, complete with camera-ready scooter chase scenes, as Noah and Thien pursue Loc. Although Shors (Beside a Burning Sea, 2008, etc.) excels at plotting, and his Saigon street cred is impeccable, the characterization is weak. Thien is impossibly angelic, Noah’s redemption feels forced and Iris quickly fades into the background.
Fictional characters serve mainly as mouthpieces for an admittedly noble mission (portions of the novel’s proceeds will support a Vietnamese children’s foundation); nonfiction might have better served the author’s purpose.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22785-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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