Engaging, pleasantly written, and endlessly inventive: all promising signs and a reader’s delight.
If Watership Down were to meet the Flashman novels—well, the result still wouldn’t be quite like this perky debut, not until you threw in a little Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, maybe.
Rabbits don’t live overly long. William, a white rabbit—cue Jefferson Airplane on the soundtrack if you will and must—is 11, a ripeness that “obliges me to press on with my storytelling.” William is a winsome character, his granny, Old Lavender, a little less tender but always good for a morsel of wisdom: “The most interesting things in life cannot be seen, William,” she intones, which is perhaps why lagomorphs—not rodents, mind you—are so committed to digging deep down into the earth. In debut novelist Francombe’s charming confection, William determines that the burrow in which he lives was once part of the Belgian battlefield on which Napoleon and Wellington slugged it out for the last time, which means that plenty of ancestral rabbits must have been blown to bits two centuries ago but also that the survivors “had not been too traumatized to procreate.” Chasing down the reverberations of that history through modern rabbitdom, Francombe would seem to be serving up an allegory, and though what she’s allegorizing isn’t exactly clear—war, memory, the importance of family, and maybe even rabbit-free cuisine are all thematic candidates—she never lets on that this coney island of the mind isn’t an impossibility. Nicely developed, too, is her sense of how rabbits think of time: there isn’t a lot of it in their world, but that doesn’t mean that one needs to scamper about mindlessly, for, to quote William by way of Old Lavender once more, “to do something important at the wrong moment is worse than not doing it at all.” You’d look high and low, too, for a better description of how rabbits actually are—twitchy and pensive but also content to spend their days “eyes half shut, contemplating the infinite.”
Engaging, pleasantly written, and endlessly inventive: all promising signs and a reader’s delight.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24691-9
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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