Oates explores the long echoes of violence born of sexism and racism in one young woman’s life in this deft psychological...
A young girl is exiled from her family after she reveals her brothers’ involvement in a brutal crime.
Oates (Mysteries of Winterthurn, 2018, etc.) has often found her fictional subject matter in the lives of girls and young women struggling with the aftermath of trauma. This time her main character is Violet Rue Kerrigan, youngest of seven siblings in a close-knit, working-class Irish Catholic family living on Oates’ upstate New York turf in the early 1990s. It’s a family imbued with sexism and racism, led by an angry father and a mother who teaches her three daughters compliance as a way to survive such men; as Violet says: “If you do not antagonize them, if you behave exactly as they wish you to behave, they will not be cruel to you.” Violet learns the terrible consequences of noncompliance when she’s 12. Her two oldest brothers have already evaded punishment for a gang rape when, one night, out drinking, they encounter a lone black teenager and beat him savagely. Violet is the only one who knows their secret. After the boy dies, she panics and tells her school principal and nurse what she knows. She’s put in protective custody—one brother has injured her as a threat—but is utterly shocked to learn that her family doesn’t want her back. Oates follows Violet for more than a decade as, marked by the traumas of her exile and her upbringing, she is targeted by a series of male predators. Her mental stability sometimes deteriorates into the fever-dream state Oates can evoke so well; the author shifts point of view among first, second, and third person as if Violet can’t even get a grip on her own identity. Violet’s fraught relationship with her family moves to an explosive climax, but there are signs of redemption as well, for her at least.
Oates explores the long echoes of violence born of sexism and racism in one young woman’s life in this deft psychological thriller.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-289983-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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