Themes of coming and going, holding on and letting go, permeate this highly engaging, captivating, and, yes, dream-infused...
A stranger comes to town, offering mysterious potions that will let the townspeople dream about whatever they want, in Fournier Watson's imaginative debut.
When 9-year-old Benjamin Dawson ventures outside to confront an enormous moon above his window, adventure and magic seem to be on offer. Then Benny goes missing, the dream peddler, Robert Owens, arrives, and everyone in town wants to buy his magic potions. Sixteen-year-old Toby Jenkins wants to dream about girls who won't reject him romantically. Benny's father, George, wants a dream that will help him locate his son. Christina Blackwell wants to dream of her future husband. While George and his wife, Evie, struggle to cope with the aftermath of their son's disappearance, the peddler quietly insinuates himself into the life of the town. The seasons change. Eight-year-old Alistair McBryde desires a nightmare that he'll secretly inflict on his bullying brother. Evie ignores her mother's warnings that the peddler is a fraud and approaches him with an unusual dream request. With the peddler present, the town's minister, Mr. Arnold, preaches against the sin of dream-buying. Gossip, lies, deceits, and misunderstandings entangle the peddler in a scandal, and Evie must try to resolve her feelings toward him in a lovely, bittersweet ending. The novel's opening chapters are slightly marred by an occasionally intrusive narrator and some cumbersome backstory. Overall, however, Fournier Watson's tale is gorgeous and carefully paced, with subtle tensions among the townspeople and lush descriptions of the natural world.
Themes of coming and going, holding on and letting go, permeate this highly engaging, captivating, and, yes, dream-infused story.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313317-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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