Weighty and disquieting.
A young, idealistic couple is torn apart as they are entangled in the Peoples Temple cult.
Just out of college and early in their marriage, Evelyn and Lenny Lynden move to Evergreen Valley, California, so Lenny can fulfill his conscientious objector service in a state mental hospital. Lenny is soon exhausted by his work and regularly comes home with energy only to get high. Evelyn tries to devote herself to homemaking, but the loneliness wears on her. Evelyn suggests the two go to church, where she is immediately taken in by the imposing, charismatic figure of Jim Jones. Evelyn and Lenny become deeply ingrained in the Peoples Temple, and Evelyn begins an affair with Jones—who has a wife and children—and soon divorces Lenny. Evelyn (who was inspired by a woman named Carolyn Moore) eventually has a son with Jones, and Lenny marries another member. Evelyn’s isolation is clear, but any understanding of her motivations is deeply obscure. Woollett’s novel, which is heavily researched, traverses the uneasy terrain between historical fiction and all that cannot be known about the inner lives of real people. History blends with mythology, creating a dizzying effect in which a reader, too, will be searching for something to ground them. In an effort to explore multiple perspectives, Woollett (The Love of a Bad Man, 2017, etc.) begins to focus on a tumult of other characters, with Lenny and Evelyn receding from the center; the story is at times difficult to follow. Woollett explores how Jones could have been so captivating and manipulative (with a heavy focus on his lies, sexual manipulations, and abuses of his followers), but the Temple's purported focus on socialism and race relations isn't as clear. In the end, a reader feels the characters hurtling toward doom after the cult moves to Guyana. Perhaps one of the story’s most devastating takeaways is that two characters who started out deeply committed to pacifism and the imagining of a better world ultimately failed to imagine any actions other than fear, violence, and death.
Weighty and disquieting.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947534-63-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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
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