A well-crafted, emotionally satisfying historical novel.
Brownell’s tale takes place in the colony of Connecticut in 1753, where religion rules all.
Young Mercy Bramble, our narrator, is in the New London jail and slated to be hanged the next day. What follows is her account of what led to this sorry pass. Mercy’s mother gave her up to the Holt family as an indentured servant. She takes her duties and her station seriously. Later, she is traded to the Palmes family, headed by the mysterious Bryan Palmes, a foundling. One passionate night, they make love, but the widowed Bryan goes on to marry someone closer to his rank—the widowed Elizabeth Way (aka “the Hawk” for her features and demeanor). The Hawk’s son, Nat, tries to rape Mercy, then persuades himself that he is actually in love with her. Mercy’s child by Bryan is found dead immediately after birth, and, in a real kangaroo court, she is convicted of murdering it. While she is in jail, the new Episcopal minister, Matthew Graves, visits—to save her soul if not her body—and falls in love with her. As to the climax, we can only say that there is a clever and dramatic last-minute twist. Brownell writes well, and one thing that grabs the reader time and again is the self-righteous cruelty and pretense of these upstanding people, descendants of the Puritans, who are quick to condemn people like Mercy but not above bedding them (the cowardly Bryan of course does not acknowledge paternity). The reader grows to hate these twisted, smug hypocrites, a credit to Brownell’s handling of character. The final scene, at the gallows, is especially well paced, a nail-biter all the way. And Mercy is a wonderful character: a creature of her times—sometimes self-hating, as she has been taught, but sometimes showing an evolving awareness that something is rotten, that blind righteousness has vanquished love and charity. Mercy is well named.
A well-crafted, emotionally satisfying historical novel.Pub Date: April 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-940863-16-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Elm Grove Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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