A likable if rambling debut that never quite gels.
First-time novelist Moraff swings and occasionally hits in this homespun tale about a plucky baseball team during the Depression. This book won the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough award in general fiction.
Ensconced in a nursing home and nearing the end of his life, the unnamed narrator, a former pitcher, recalls the Racine Robins, a ragtag team unified in their conviction that the common man deserves as much of a fair shake as a Wall Street millionaire. “We were working men,” he opines, “and we knew that luxury softens your resolve, that comfort weakens your character.” The Robins barnstorm through the Midwest, drumming up funds for struggling communities. A freak April snowstorm strands them at the John D. Rockefeller lodge in Wisconsin, where they meet Spencer, a wealthy blowhard who treats them all to lavish meals, attempting to influence them with his plutocratic views. He eventually wears down Mike (the narrator’s best friend and an incandescent talent on the ball field) by dangling promises of a glorious major league career as well as the hand of his own alluring daughter. Unsurprisingly, the Robins’ ultimate fates fail to match up to their youthful expectations. Moraff’s prose doles out its pleasures sporadically, as in a description of a meal at the Rockefeller: “The steaks were exhibits from some museum of butchery, trophies from a cattleman’s hall of fame. So juicy you could have squeezed them into a glass.” But too often the novel drifts aimlessly in its own warm bath of nostalgia, circling among a series of flashbacks that diffuse the impact of its class conflict. The narrator’s thwarted romance with a cafe waitress further thins the plot, leaving the sense that this novel might have worked better as a pared-down short story.
A likable if rambling debut that never quite gels.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4778-4818-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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