More discipline and fewer pyrotechnics would have served this story well. For the moment, in the Rhett Butler–ish words of...
Edgar Allan Poe meets Bruce Catton: a mishmash of historical novel, thriller, and psychological study set in Civil War–era Louisiana.
It stands to reason that if someone were to have bitten a person's ear off in the days before Mike Tyson, he or she might have earned a fitting sobriquet of savagery. So it is with Elise Durel, in New Orleans for her first dance and the victim of unwanted attentions, who now, 18 years later, is known as “Mademoiselle le Cannibale” or—shades of Anne Rice—“ ’Ti Vampire.” High-strung only begins to describe her, and things go from bad to worse when her 12-year-old son, his father Angel Woolsack of Wascom’s debut, The Blood of Heaven (2013), goes missing. It being New Orleans, anything can happen, especially in a dislocated time when the Confederate regulars have just fled in droves, “overtaken by the Federal blue,” and an occupying Union force led by a memorably corrupt, porcine general racked by “burning diarrheal evacuations” is now in charge. But is it really? Not in a city in which the stamp of the devil is common currency and all kinds of bestial things happen, the more distaff of them “bolstering the general’s growing impression that the women of this city are more twisted than the men.” Wascom’s yarn is shaggier than 10 sheepdogs, and while there’s much of merit in the book, it’s relentlessly overwritten, as if the shade of Cormac McCarthy had been summoned to the Ouija board and ping-ponged a text from some other dimension where the dictionary is better exploited than in our own. Beneath the showy language and endless allusion (one character, in an evident nod to Poe, is named Ligeia) lies a potentially satisfying thriller packed with meaningful malice (as with, for instance, a banner embroidered with the motto “the she-adder’s venom is as deadly as the he-adder’s”). Getting to it, though, takes a lot of work.
More discipline and fewer pyrotechnics would have served this story well. For the moment, in the Rhett Butler–ish words of Angel, “It doesn’t make a damn.”Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2361-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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