Peelle isn’t subtle with these message moments, but she’s a natural storyteller with a fine sense of town life and...
In this colorful down-home drama, two young drifters stop for a time in Tennessee of a century ago, where they trade in mules and learn of local secrets amid the small-town ferment of the U.S. entering World War I.
Billy and Charles find themselves lingering in Richfield, Tennessee, after a local parvenu tricks them into buying The Midnight Cool, a beautiful mare with a murderous temperament. Charles soon has a good job trading in mules being sent overseas for British troops. He also has fallen for the parvenu’s daughter, Catherine, and must set himself up as worthy of her. Billy, somewhat sidelined, gets a back story in brief, eloquent chapters that interrupt the main narrative. In fact, Peelle (Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, 2009, etc.) seems torn between her two male leads. While Charles carries the main plot and themes (star-crossed love, patriotism, profit versus honesty, and dark family histories), he’s a bit dense and melodramatic. Billy is more likable. He has the best lines, the wit to grasp any situation quickly, and the grit to endure physical pain and the emotional wounds of one bad choice. Such choices and their consequences can seem to stand like billboards in the story—along with lines that seem scripted for a Clint Eastwood parody, like: “A mule’s got nothing but his own life to prove himself by.” Charles and Catherine face one such choice after their first night of sex. Her father’s affair with a black servant brings on more than one and sets up the book’s cruelest scene. Charles has another tough one when some of the mules in a big shipment come down with a fatal infectious disease.
Peelle isn’t subtle with these message moments, but she’s a natural storyteller with a fine sense of town life and characters and of a time when maybe irony couldn’t tarnish words like “duty.”Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247546-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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