A well-wrought, moving saga of reservation life in the throes of change that feels both painful and exhilarating.
A Navajo Indian veteran of World War II—part of the famous “code talkers” unit—feels torn between tradition and the white man’s world in this absorbing tale of fractured identities.
Frustrated with his aimless life on an economically depressed Arizona reservation, 28-year-old Jimmie Goodluck signs up with the Marine Corps in 1942 and gets slotted into an all-Navajo platoon. Already toughened by hardscrabble desert life, the Navajo recruits thrive in the military, one of the few American institutions that treats them with respect (except when they’re mistaken for Japanese spies). They’re especially valued because of their assignment to develop a code based on the Navajo language, virtually impossible to decipher, for rapid radio communications. In an earnestly gung-ho but rather sketchy narrative, the war takes Jimmie and his comrades from Guadalcanal to the bloodbath at Iwo Jima. His story deepens when he comes home in 1946, horizons expanded, to a reservation where little seems to have changed: Jobs are scarce, poverty deep, racism ubiquitous and government callous. (The uncompensated slaughter of Navajo livestock to prevent overgrazing is a particular sore point.) During peyote rituals, he sees mystic visions that seem to endorse his father’s bitter suspicion of the white man. Yet Jimmie is also drawn to other forces, including a progressive family of tribal leaders and the fetching sister of a slain comrade who wants to help her people in thoroughly modern ways. Stillman (A Match Made in Hell, 2005) paints a rich portrait of Navajo life with an impressive depth and detail, steeping the reader in vibrant folkways and grand, austere landscapes. But he also portrays a backward-looking, claustrophobic society seething with ancient vendettas that shape and limit his characters. The subtle, sensitive prose captures the psychological complexity of the people who live there as they walk a tightrope bridge between a warm but fading past and a future of hope and uncertainty.
A well-wrought, moving saga of reservation life in the throes of change that feels both painful and exhilarating.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475955545
Page Count: 376
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2012
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 vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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