Williams is a first-time novelist, and it shows. The point of view teeters between Urby’s flashy first-person observations...
A raucous exercise in screwball historical fiction with some hard-boiled action blended in.
Let’s see: A creole jazz clarinetist and one-time World War I air ace working as a private detective in 1934 Paris; a fascist French aristocrat and Nazi sympathizer whose closest aide is a belligerent African-American drummer; a trumped-up kidnapping with an oblique connection to the Lindbergh kidnapping that same year, which in turn will lead to a Nazi takeover of the U.S. And there are even more historically rooted whoppers in this satiric pulp pastiche written by a longtime African-American expatriate who’s borrowed some of his own real-life experiences and tossed them into this slam-bang vaudeville revue of mayhem, murder and cross-racial mischief. The gallivanting plot begins with the story’s stalwart hero, the aforementioned jazz artist/war hero/private eye Urby Brown, agreeing to help a shady white American businessman retrieve his beautiful daughter from the clutches of the aforementioned black drummer. Urby, of course, senses from the start he’s not being told the whole truth. (Is she really his daughter? Is he trying to set Urby up for the police?) In the meantime, the aforementioned aristocrat, who bears a remarkable resemblance to the detective, has his own suspect motives for finding the daughter, who’s nowhere near as helpless as she seems and who has sexual longings for both Adolf Hitler and her would-be rescuer. All the while, socialist and fascist mobs engage in bloody fisticuffs in the streets as Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Sidney Bechet and other real-life figures make cameo appearances.
Williams is a first-time novelist, and it shows. The point of view teeters between Urby’s flashy first-person observations and a blander third-person narrative. Yet the book’s ragbag-deco milieu enhances its perversely anachronistic appeal.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-888889-7-65
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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
PROFILES
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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