Fay’s gentle humor and risk-averse approach don't do justice to her rollicking subject matter.
A novel of the vaudeville circuit, circa 1919.
An ordinary working-class family in Johnson City, New York, is threatened with penury when breadwinner Frank, a usually sober boot stitcher, gets into an uncharacteristic bar brawl and injures his hand. Fortunately for the Turners, however, wife Ethel, aka Mother, has always had a yen for the stage. She quickly molds her four daughters, Kit, Winnie, Gert, and Nell, ranging in age from 13 to 22, into a vaudeville act, the titular tumblers. (Nell, a war widow with an infant, is based on the author’s great-grandmother.) The group attracts an agent who sends them, with Mother as chaperone and producer, on a tour of upstate New York’s vaudeville theaters. (Every small town near the tracks appears to have one.) From here, any further resemblance to the musical Gypsy unfortunately ends. The new troupers encounter a motley crew of performers, including Tip, an African-American tap dancing virtuoso; Case and Wheeler, a Yiddish comedy team; and Joe and Lucy, Italian immigrant musicians who are on the boards for the same reason as the Turners: avoiding poverty. Complications ensue: bigoted pigeon wranglers get Tip fired—in retaliation, Winnie liberates their flock—and a grifter steals Mother’s hidden cash. Tip reappears during another gig, and he and Gert fall in love, risking arrest for miscegenation. Winnie, whose ambition is to go to college and become a doctor, also falls hard for Joe. Meanwhile, Mother carries on a flirtation with an orangutan handler. Eventually, Frank regains the use of his hand, but by this time, the Turner women are too stage-struck to resume respectable life in Johnson City. Winnie and Gert alternate as first-person narrators, but their voices are virtually indistinguishable. Fay handles the story’s issues of racial and ethnic prejudice with a gingerliness which verges on anachronism, and contemporary locutions, like “move on with her life,” further dispel the 1919 atmosphere.
Fay’s gentle humor and risk-averse approach don't do justice to her rollicking subject matter.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3447-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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