Disjointed material and unmatured style make for some rough sledding.
Life and death among Welsh immigrant coalminers in 19th-century California.
In an awkward weave, first-novelist Cunningham, a two-time Pushcart nominee for his short fiction, incorporates an early coming-of-age story with the scapegoating of an unorthodox seminarian. Narrator Asher Witherow is born in 1863 of Welsh parents in Nortonville, California, a mining town. The influence of the old country is strong: Welsh legends abound, coexisting with fervent religious beliefs. Asher’s father, David, is resigned to life as a miner (“we endure”), while his mother, Abicca, is the militant one. At seven, Asher begins 12-hour days at the pit head, with school at night; by age nine, he’s underground, soon working alongside his father. Death is never far away. Asher’s playmate Thomas accidentally burns to death in an abandoned mine. Even though he saw it happen, Asher denies all knowledge and is crippled by guilt. Josiah Lyte, seminarian and Asher’s teacher, is to be unfairly implicated by the narrow-minded townspeople. Josiah knows that Asher is a prodigy, and the two have quickly bonded. Josiah, the best character here, is the son of missionaries in India, and he embraces Hindu deities and Buddha as well as Christ. His pantheism resonates strongly with the young Asher, who is as advanced physically as he is spiritually—and before he’s 12, he has impregnated his little girlfriend Anna (“Our bodies had stepped over without us”). Fire burns again, this time as metaphor for the sexual union. Too frail to sustain a pregnancy, Anna consents to an abortion, but then she too dies in a fire. Next, Asher’s mother dies, and Josiah (present at Anna’s abortion) is run out of town. Such events are all shoehorned into the final third of a poorly paced novel that strives mightily to find the right language for the elemental Lawrentian urges at work, though too often the result is bombast.
Disjointed material and unmatured style make for some rough sledding.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-932961-00-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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