Poignant and historically fascinating, with plenty of high-speed action.
Bryant presents a historical novel based upon the true story of a woman who became one of Virginia’s most notorious bootleggers.
Willie May Collins, born in 1903 to a southwestern Virginian farming family, harbors a powerful streak of independence and a fierce desire to become something more than the wife of a poor farmer. She also has a knack with machinery, especially automobiles. In 1918, at 15 years of age, she takes a job in a tobacco factory rolling cigarettes. Two years later, she moves to a rooming house in Roanoke and lands a job at the local five-and-dime, where she attracts the attention of Floyd Carter, son of the richest bootlegger in the county. He picks her up after work in his Buick convertible. Willie convinces Floyd to let her drive his car, and the fire is lit. (She doesn’t love him, but she is having fun.) Before long, when Floyd promises to buy her a car of her own if she agrees to marry him, she becomes Mrs. Willie Carter. Married life is luxurious, but Willie becomes bored and irritated with Floyd. Her father-in-law, however, sees promise in Willie and offers her a job as one of his drivers delivering moonshine. It’s just what she’s been hoping for. Thus begins an exciting, dangerous, and heartbreaking career that will make her infamous. Bryant’s novel is packed with details highlighting the intricacies of bootlegging—the complicated routes and detours, the payoffs to local law enforcement, and, always, the incredible speeds at which the heavily fortified cars traveled. The book also has interesting tidbits about the manufacture of moonshine, a local industry that went back over generations of folks living in Floyd County, Virginia. Willie May’s tale is recounted in two voices, hers and that of her devoted younger brother, James (also called Junebug or Jimmy). In prose distinguished by a distinctly Southern musicality, Bryant captures the physical beauty and the atmosphere of southwest Virginia; Jimmy says of a summer day, “The humidity is so heavy I think about how a fish senses an angler’s bait underwater.”
Poignant and historically fascinating, with plenty of high-speed action.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781685135546
Page Count: 201
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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