An idiosyncratic but ultimately engaging tale about a contemporary teen forced to live as a slave in the 1850s.
In this debut YA novel, a young black rapper finds himself transported back to the age of slavery.
Three new slaves arrive at the Deauville Plantation, the home of the elderly Sean Deauville, known throughout South Carolina as a man who can break even the most rebellious worker. But one of the new acquisitions is no ordinary slave. Donald “Hip Hop” Berry is an irreverent, teenage rapper from modern-day New York. After getting admonished by a group of his female peers for using derogatory language in his lyrics, Hip Hop is struck by a car, knocked into a coma, and wakes up as a slave in 1855. At the plantation, Hip Hop enters a hell on Earth he could never have imagined. A freshly tortured slave hangs from a tree by a hook; malnourished children fight one another for food; and an overseer with a whip enforces Sean’s brutal law: “In that instant, Hip Hop experiences more pain than he has ever felt before. He screams in agony when the blood-clotted cowskin slices his flesh apart. Immediately, blood starts to gush from his wounds, and he falls to the ground, crying like never before.” Forced into cruel servitude, Hip Hop begins to learn the real meanings behind some of the slurs he’s employed in his raps, coming to terms with the true violence that intolerance can wreak on human beings. He also finds, in the company of the other slaves, a sense of community—and even a leadership role—that he never had in New York. Hip Hop might not know how to get back to his own time, but after a woman named Moses tells him how to reach freedom, he understands he has to help his people get there. Sears writes in an expressive, conversational prose that never shies away from the ruthless details of slavery. But his lack of subtlety sometimes leads to clumsy moments, as when a physician explains to Hip Hop’s parents what has happened to their son: “ ‘This is very unusual, but he appears to be dreaming,’ says the doctor. ‘Apparently the blow to the head knocked him out and sent him on a terrible journey. By that, I mean he is unconscious in our world, but he might be wide-awake somewhere within a vivid dream he is having.’ ” There is a broad, homespun quality to both the writing and the plot. The author’s project is overt, and the characters generally say exactly what they mean. Even the images by debut illustrator Cephas that accompany the story have a frank, folk-art quality that sometimes works beautifully and sometimes falls flat. That said, the novel’s heart is in the right place, and its rough-hewn earnestness quickly becomes charming. Yes, the plot is predictable, and yes, Hip Hop makes a speech at the end saying what he’s learned, but some issues are Manichaean enough that subtlety is not particularly needed. Slavery was awful. Intolerance is wrong. Sears, Cephas, and Hip Hop are happy to remind readers of these facts.
An idiosyncratic but ultimately engaging tale about a contemporary teen forced to live as a slave in the 1850s.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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