An entertaining coming-of-age tale with a final amusing twist.
McElrath’s whimsically imaginative novel brings together three famous female protagonists from late-19th- and early-20th-century popular fiction and challenges the line between reality and fantasy.
The story opens in the spring of 1904, in a small, hardscrabble Kansas farmhouse, as 8-year-old Dorothy Gale (familiar to readers from L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels) is regaining consciousness after suffering a blow to her head—an injury that occurred after a tornado ripped through the area. She finds herself surrounded by her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and three farmhands—known as Hawk, Chicory, and Zach—who are as close to her as family. On her feet she wears a pair of maroon-colored slippers. She tells her aunt about a place beyond the rainbow that she’s just visited, but this revelation is met with confusion and fear. Doc Sorensen, a local physician, declares that she has hallucinated her visit to Oz; she is, perhaps, suffering from “prairie fever,” he surmises. But this diagnosis doesn’t take at least one mystery into account: Where did she acquire those strange slippers? Later that year, across the Atlantic Ocean, three missing children—John, Michael, and Wendy Darling of Peter Panfame—have returned to their London home after a two-week disappearance; they report an extraordinary adventure in a strange place called Neverland. In 1905, both Dorothy and Wendy begin a year in the care of Dr. Alice Liddell-Dodgson, a British psychiatrist who is uniquely equipped to treat young delusional patients: As a child, she mistakenly ate a psychedelic mushroom, after which she found herself in a place called Wonderland.
Over the course of this novel, McElrath presents readers with a lively narrative that draws on elements of familiar classic tales while also featuring an ample supply of humorous dialogue, with Wendy speaking in the voice of a well-educated member of London’s upper-middle class (“Dorothy Gale is a complete peasant!” she writes at one point), and Dorothy (who initially calls Wendy a “prissypants”) speaking in the rough dialect of the Kansas plains. Overall, the narrative reveals itself as a tale of friendship and love set against a backdrop of scientific research that’s frequently belied by unexplained, apparently magical occurrences. Indeed, as the story goes on and readers watch Dorothy and Wendy grow to young adulthood, it becomes apparent that there is more to their supposed delusions than meets the scientific eye. McElrath draws upon Native American snake-based legends and Scottish mysticism (“tales of Tir-Nan-Og and thesidheand boucca spirits”), which, in the story, is consciously and unconsciously passed down through the generations. The cannabis-smoking Alice plays a relatively small albeit pivotal role in the novel compared to the other two literary figures, but she effectively helps the girls to distinguish fantasy from reality during her interactions with them. Added to the mix are adult discussions of sexual orientation (“A love that dares not speak its name?” “A love...that hasn’t any name”) as well as nods to feminism.
An entertaining coming-of-age tale with a final amusing twist.Pub Date: July 17, 2022
ISBN: 9781772172096
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Club Lighthouse Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2023
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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