A dry tale that imagines an independent South in the 20th century.
A debut alternative history novel tracks a family through the century following the South’s victory in the Civil War.
New Orleans, 1909. Forty-four years after the South won the Civil War, Tulane student Eric Kaufmann, son of a German immigrant, proposes to the half-Cherokee Stephanie Weaver, forming a future-minded couple for a new Southern century. The issues of the day are the same that affect the Confederate States of America’s former enemy (and current ally) to the north: economic development, women’s suffrage, an entangling war in Europe, and the demands of modernization. Their son, Henry, becomes a radio pioneer and founds his own political party to address the creep of industrialization, a common currency with the United States, and the vulnerabilities of the still-extant Hapsburg-helmed Mexican Empire. A third generation of Kaufmanns is born and raised in New Orleans, and with that group the family becomes ever more cosmopolitan, politically engaged, and influential to the culture of the CSA. Three historical appendices detail the ways in which the Confederacy won the war and made peace with the Union as well as how it involved itself in Mexico on behalf of its ally France and thereby propped up the Mexican Empire. Gross’ narrative voice successfully evokes early-20th-century manners. Everything is stated politely, even dramatic incidents: “Stephanie gave a short scream. She had an unusual fear of crustaceans.” The author dodges the issue of slavery, mentioning in the Introduction that the Confederacy’s raison d’être was abolished in the CSA within a generation of the war’s end: “There was very little conflict about it, and very little disruption. Employment replaced slavery. The law of supply and demand generally determined wages.” (He goes out of his way to mention that the last pro-slavery holdout in the CSA was the Cherokee Nation, oddly.) This tactic clears the way for Gross to explore the issues of the 20th century through a Southern lens. But the novel never feels like more than an intellectual exercise. Told mostly as exposition and overly concerned with the religions and marriages of the various Kaufmann offspring, the book will likely appeal to only the biggest alt history fans.
A dry tale that imagines an independent South in the 20th century.Pub Date: April 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-8871-4
Page Count: 238
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2017
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
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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