A vivacious, absorbing, and accomplished debut.
Battle’s first novel tells the story of a 1930s Blue Ridge Mountains community whose way of life is threatened by the government.
The novel opens with a letter from Bee Livingston to her 3-year-old daughter, Amelia, intriguingly stating that Amelia has been raised to believe that the wrong man was her father. By way of explanation, Bee shares her life story so that when Amelia is old enough, she can judge what kind of man her biological father was, but she adds a warning: “You ought to know there are some downright ugly secrets in this story about your own kin and your mama to boot.” Bee’s story begins in “the Hollow,” the impoverished Blue Ridge region in Virginia where she was raised. Born Ada Anabelle, she was nicknamed “Bee” by her father, as she was always “buzzing around looking for...trouble.” When she’s still young, her father is killed when a religious snake-handling show goes tragically wrong. The girl is left in the care of her mother, but their relationship is like “oil and water.” As Bee grows older, she’s told that her father was a gambler who took out three mortgages on the family home. The state government, in the shape of the repugnant Mr. Rowler, is poised to seize property in the area. Bee’s mother has plans for her daughter to marry the government man—but Bee has her eyes on Miles, a big-shot government photographer, or perhaps Torch, a boy who grew up with her “on the mountain.” Battle’s storytelling will draw readers in from the opening page: Why is Bee writing her daughter this letter—and who’s Amelia’s real father? The novel draws, in part, on real-life events; in the 1930s, Blue Ridge neighborhoods were indeed cleared to make way for Shenandoah National Park. Battle spends some time re-creating the atmosphere of the “now-vanished” area. Narrator Bee is a straight talker with an easy wit and a wry opinion on everything. When discussing Torch, for instance, she notes, “We came up like brother and sister but once I sprouted hooters, he got it in his head he wanted things to change.” The author effortlessly captures the timing and tenor of Appalachian speech patterns, and she conjures a world that may be unfamiliar to many, where the Hollow folk sing ballads and pass quart jugs of “white mule” (“that’s what us mountain folks called whiskey”). Readers are also introduced to unusual characters, such as Ruth Evers, described by Bee as a “kind of goddess…of wild and helpless things,” who makes medicine for the community using mountain plants, such as “prince’s pine and deadly nightshade,” and secretly keeps stillborn babies in mason jars. The world that Battle creates is unnerving and enchanting in equal measure and always utterly beguiling. The overall Southern drawl may grate on some, but those who are keen to burrow into the overlooked lives of mountain people will find satisfaction.
A vivacious, absorbing, and accomplished debut.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64307-013-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Mascot Books
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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