An engrossing, deftly crafted narrative.
A Virginia family suffers poverty and sorrow as slavery tears their world apart.
Taking up the lives of the Dickinson family from her last historical novel, Spalding (The Purchase, 2013, etc.) follows the misfortunes of patriarch Daniel’s sons: Benjamin, a dissolute spendthrift; and his half brother, John, born to Daniel’s second wife, “a small, sure-footed orphan” he married out of pity. Benjamin, who inherited Daniel’s money, cotton fields, and slaves, has plunged the family into debt; John, a Methodist preacher barely eking out a living for his wife and four children, tries valiantly to save both families from penury. “We must be thankful for adversity,” John preaches as he travels through the remote countryside. His life stands as a grim example. Despite his religious faith, though, John is an angry man whose own sons, headstrong Patton and quieter, introspective Martin, become victims of his rage. He bans the adolescent Patton from the house, sending him alone into the wilderness to secure land in the Kansas Territory; and when the family’s fortunes plummet, he sends his wife, daughters, and Martin to make the perilous trek west, without him. The pivotal event of the novel is the arrival of a stranger: he says he is studying birds, but in fact, he is an abolitionist come to persuade the family’s slaves to abscond to Canada. He has brought “a compass and a knife and a map” for each of them, and despite much fear, the next day many slaves have left, including Bry, whose futile escape attempt as a child had dire consequences: he was castrated. Now in his 50s, he yearns to go to Canada to find his mother. Spalding portrays in bleak, gritty detail the hardships of daily life in the 1850s. Tenderness is rare and cherished: John’s toward the slave Emly, whom Benjamin heartlessly sells; Martin’s toward a bear cub he rescues when Patton shoots the mother; and Bry’s toward a Native American woman who protects him. As the characters struggle to survive, they discover that redemption is elusive and forgiveness, hard-won.
An engrossing, deftly crafted narrative.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4700-8
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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