Eloquent but overburdened.
A fictional small town adjusts to the changing concepts of American identity in this discourse-heavy novel crammed with characters and 1920s history.
In Basalt City, Ore., reporter Donna Swan, priest Father Schmidt, teacher Peggy York, temperance-movement–leader Daisy Newton, barber Emil Mazzoni, moonshiner Dixon Jones, and a “klavern” of Ku Kluxers are a mere sampling of the characters in Hobart’s saga. There’s no shortage of historical conflict: labor strikes, integration, immigration, Prohibition, etc.—and Hobart takes on more than enough. Every character grapples with contentious cultural issues, and at times, they embody archetypes. Open-minded and open-hearted Peggy York, for example, seems to represent the future. She’s even bold enough to criticize the Klan at a public event: “What kind of community do we have when it is argued that people who do not share our values are not just wrong but morally inferior?” she asks. “What will this prejudice do to our future economic growth and standard of living?” One of Hobart’s successful devices is the inclusion of meeting minutes from the Basalt City Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan, providing insight into the group’s thought process. However, Hobart relies heavily on dialogue, which is often too expository to be believed. Much of the novel’s plot is driven by civic debate, particularly an initiative to abolish private schools; the Klan, especially, fears the presence of Catholic schools. The school initiative dominates much of the novel’s first half, but when that matter is settled, other civic concerns rush in to take its place. “That summer,” Hobart writes, “Basalt City slipped off the edge of emotional excitement brought on by concern over the strike, the election, the legislature, the KKK march, and the black ghetto.” The omnipresent animus among some of the city’s residents leads to kidnapping, rape, hostage holding and suicides, each event laced with political motivations. However, in the rich but broad story, a surprisingly happy ending for many of the characters provides some relief.
Eloquent but overburdened.Pub Date: May 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480276086
Page Count: 414
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2013
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
