Well-intentioned, but heavy-handed.
In White’s sixth novel (The Garden of Martyrs, 2004, etc.), a man captures a runaway slave and discovers moral qualms he’s been repressing for years.
Tracking people is Augustus Cain’s only marketable skill, but he isn’t eager to practice it anymore. The patriotic Southerner isn’t against slavery, but he dislikes the superior attitude of the wealthy plantation owners who hire him and the dangers of extracting black fugitives from the increasingly abolitionist North. Faced with a huge gambling debt and the threatened loss of his beloved horse, however, Cain reluctantly agrees to retrieve runaway Rosetta for her master, a tobacco planter named Eberly whose extreme insistence suggests “a more personal reason for wanting her back.” Judging Cain not too reliable, Eberly saddles him with three companions: the white-trash Strofe brothers and the psychopathic Preacher, who tries to rape Rosetta almost as soon as she’s caught. Like most of the other heavily foreshadowed events here, the resulting confrontation between Cain and Preacher occurs primarily to provide an impetus for Cain to acknowledge the horrors of slavery and his feelings for the proud, abused Rosetta, which make it impossible for him to return her to Eberly. Despite lots of backstory about his service in the Mexican War and love for a peasant girl who was killed for sleeping with a gringo, Cain isn’t an interesting enough character for his moral awakening to be terribly compelling. Rosetta too is sketched in very broad strokes, and Eberly is a cartoon villain. The author has nothing new to say about slavery or the mixed motives of those who supported it, though that doesn’t prevent White from indulging in long passages that explain Cain’s shifting perspective rather than dramatizing it. It’s all as obvious as the protagonist’s surname. An epilogue that shows Cain on the eve of the battle of Antietam is almost offensive, suggesting that loving Rosetta changed nothing essential about him.
Well-intentioned, but heavy-handed.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-134072-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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