Despite some narrative missteps, Gwin’s latest effort will inspire further exploration of an underexamined American tragedy.
After a natural disaster, two families must confront the awful event that links them.
When a tornado struck the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, in April 1936, more than 200 people died. But the black residents who lost their lives during the disaster were not included in the official count of the dead. In her second novel, Gwin (The Queen of Palmyra, 2010) attempts to provide a corrective by focusing on a black family, the Grand’hommes, and a white family, the McNabbs. The story alternates between the perspectives of Dovey, the Grand’homme matriarch and a washerwoman, and Jo, the McNabbs’ teenage daughter, who encounter each other in a somewhat contrived moment after the tornado has passed through town. As each woman navigates the devastation of the city while looking for her family, Gwin explores how Tupelo’s black and white residents were treated differently in the aftermath while capably deploying flashback to reveal the history of each family and the violent moment that unites them. Though the story is generally well-paced, with foreshadowing placed nicely throughout, readers may become impatient once they’ve cracked the mystery that propels the plot. At times, Gwin’s prose is profound and Faulkner-ian in tone: “Time isn’t a river, Jo thought; time is ground and dirt and the roots of ancient trees and the bones of past things. Time is underfoot”; at others, it relies on cliché or the obvious (“melted like snow in the sun”) or misfires in its details, such as a remark about Dovey having walked through the McNabbs’ front door regularly or Jo’s immense regret for using a racial slur, while not providing sufficient evidence for readers to expect such departures from 1930s Southern social mores. Still, those who enjoy Southern fiction that explores both sides of the color line will want to give Gwin’s latest a gander, and the novel’s especially timely focus on what happens to communities in the aftermath of a natural disaster will draw many readers.
Despite some narrative missteps, Gwin’s latest effort will inspire further exploration of an underexamined American tragedy.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-247171-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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