A noteworthy and insightful poetic portrait.
Ohio Poet Laureate Gunter-Seymour tells a decades-spanning, lyrical story of Appalachia in which the personal is both political and generational.
Appalachia stretches over 2,000 miles between Mississippi and the southern edge of New York state. Despite this, the region and its people are often described as forgotten, due in part to widespread poverty and opioid addiction. For the last decade or so, Appalachian artists and writers—including Scott McClanahan in The Sarah Book (2015) and Barbara Kingsolver in Demon Copperhead (2022)—have been chipping away at stereotypes associated with their homeland and placing it firmly into the collective American consciousness. Gunter-Seymour adds to the canon with this collection informed by her upbringing in Appalachian Ohio, which she dedicates to “all the invisible girls.” The poet, whose previous work is similarly site-specific, allows her speaker to witness her own becoming in a place haunted by history and the women who came before her: “I was the silk gown my mother / would never own, the black dust / of coal-fraught mountains, the face / of my grandmothers” (“Because My Ancestors”). Later, in “Golden Hour,” the speaker watches “palsied hands / make a gesture, as if / letting go a bird.” These folk-song rhythms, loaded enjambments, and hard words frequently give way to soft imagery, such as that of bush beans in a simmering pot (“Reincarnation”). Although the speaker appears subtly transformed by the third and final section, the author’s stylistic consistency can’t help but expose the fixedness that surrounds her in a land that’s “ripe with possibility” but seems destined to repeat itself over and over, while leaving grooves in the dirt.
A noteworthy and insightful poetic portrait.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781958094358
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Eastover Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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