There are some fine characterizations and much drama here, but the author’s uneven lyricism (she veers into purple prose and...
A mysterious abandonment and reunion frame multi-generational trauma, racial violence and lasting emotional damage.
Middle-aged Alice is making strawberry jam when her mother Olivia, who abandoned her at age four, knocks on the front door. From the moment Alice answers with “bloodlike glaze dripping” from her fingers, we know we are in portentous (and occasionally pretentious) southern gothic territory. Best known for the easy charm of her Hope Springs trilogy, here Hinton (The Last Odd Day, 2004, etc.) taps into the darker, if not deeper, vein of her recent work. Olivia dies soon after Alice meets her. Grieving, Alice recalls her awful foster childhood and then the book settles into the story of Olivia’s birth and life. Olivia’s mother Mattie is a sex-driven, emotionally frigid product of her own father’s violence. She arrives in Greensboro, N.C., pregnant, but in deep denial, her five-year-old son Roy tagging along like an afterthought. She settles into a shack on the edge of Smoketown, Greensboro’s black ghetto, right next to Ruth, a saintly black woman with her own history of violence. Olivia is born on the heels of the grotesque killing of a young black man and the dramatic ice storm that follows. Ruth’s children, Tree, and her dreamy older brother, E. Saul, become Olivia’s only real friends. Roy, however, turns mean and violent as he grows into manhood, setting the scene for more horrific violence, events that shatter Olivia and the little love she has known. The dénouement, told from Alice’s point of view, offers a few shreds of redemption and a sermon-like anecdote justifying the title (Hinton is a pastor).
There are some fine characterizations and much drama here, but the author’s uneven lyricism (she veers into purple prose and cliché) and limited psychological acuity (cycles of abuse figure largely here) doesn’t quite rise to the challenge of her material.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-34795-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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