Give newcomer Baker points for audacity: He sets out to write a novel that's a highly original coming-of-age tale, a story of warring families, a mediation on the complex nature of familial affection, and a tale of matricide—among other things. And, in at least some of his intentions, he succeeds. Abraham Issac Lee, the son of a turbulent, wealthy, deeply eccentric southerner, is looking back at his childhood in the relatively benign precincts of 1950s and '60s Florida. His father settles there after the Korean War, and decides to build a drive-in theater featuring the world's largest outdoor screen. He does so, with the help of a believably odd crew of helpers. The drive-in, vast, gaudy, is an immediate success. The downside is that Lee has chosen to build it in proximity to a large, elegant funeral home, and the two patriarchs begin a long, increasingly nasty battle to see who'll dominate the neighborhood. Matters become even more complicated when a teenage Abe falls in love with Grace, the funeral director's only daughter, even as he's being pursued by a rather enigmatic woman who's quietly assumed the management of the drive-in. This would likely be sufficient plot for many writers, but Baker wants more, and he deftly interweaves storylines involving the question of identity and family (Abe and his sister, both adopted, are Korean), the way in which public dramas (here, everything from the Cold War to the death of JFK) impact on private lives, and on love's crippling power. The novel's strengths are its set-pieces: Abe's gentle courtship of Grace, a rowdy, comic Fourth of July celebration, and, on a far grimmer note, the fiery end of the drive-in and Abe's innocence. The problem is that there's simply too much here—too many contending storylines and moods crowding each other out. This is, at times, a truly affecting work, and an inventive one, but too clamorous in its parts to be a complete success.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-375-40050-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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