A dark and compelling tale of violence and dementia in colonial Massachusetts, with an unforgettable young girl at the heart...
A historical novel of psychological suspense explores 17th-century New England.
Freemartin’s (The Cult of Scorpio, 2015, etc.) work opens in 1680 in Greenwood Village, a small Massachusetts Bay Colony town near enough to Boston to buy city fineries but far enough away to seem most often like an alien world. Judith Temple, the town’s midwife and apothecary, is an unconventional, free-spirited woman who has taken in as her apprentice a 10-year-old Native American orphan she names Vigory. They form one of the book’s narrative focal points. Judith and Vigory are outsiders to the strict and sometimes borderline-hysterical religious conservatism of the town, a Cotton Mather-style righteousness that’s spearheaded by Harriet Browne, the wife of the village’s constable. Freemartin portrays the relationship between Judith and Vigory with subtle compassion as a blend of teacher-student and mother-daughter (“Vigory attacked all Judith taught her with vigor; she did everything with a serious and vigorous sincerity, from eating to working, to those rare moments of play that children in the colony can find between harvest and planting season”). This stands in stark contrast to the twisted combination of hatred and abuse that Harriet feels for her grossly overweight daughter, Miriam. When Harriet declares that Greenwood should undergo a fast to recover God’s grace and her own daughter rebels, the tension festers into a cloud of psychological gloom that should be familiar to any student of the Salem witch trials. In this complex and insightful tale, Miriam remains the strangest and most striking character (“You could get lost following the expansive curves of her body, every line always radiating away from the core, the center of her being”). Her behavior becomes increasingly peculiar, and the town is visited with torrents of rain, an infestation of frogs, and other woes that lend themselves readily to supernatural explanations. Freemartin propels this plot forward with a sure hand and a sharp, knowing ear for revealing dialogue. Her powers of imagery are strong throughout (about Boston: its streets were “laid out like poorly set bones”). And the novel’s climax, which might seem overwrought in less skillful hands, is instead hold-your-breath gripping.
A dark and compelling tale of violence and dementia in colonial Massachusetts, with an unforgettable young girl at the heart of it all.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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