A resonant novel for any reader who knows what it is to build a life in a new, sometimes unfriendly, place.
The lives of two immigrants in 19th-century America converge on the East Coast in Matthews’ debut historical novel.
In 1883, Irishwoman Johanna Kennedy is working at a hotel in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, when her friend Kathleen brings in En Chang, an immigrant from China who’s looking for work. The lives of Johanna and En become entangled as they both experience their own struggles in this new town, which is rife with corruption and the threat of violence from the Molly Maguires as tensions in Ireland spill over into the New World. Matthews has taken as the novel’s subject the intertwined yet very different experiences of two sets of immigrants to America in the latter half of the 19th century: the Chinese and the Irish, both of whom experienced extreme hardship and racism. The character of Johanna is actually based upon the author’s own great-grandmother, and there’s a loving tenderness applied to her story. A devoted mother to her children who found herself having to marry her husband after her true love died, Johanna is propelled by her experience of loss to try to build a better future—a highly compelling and emotional journey, mired deeply in loss. (A line in the prologue, “Grief is love with nowhere to go,” truly seems to set the theme for Matthews’ novel.) Though much of En’s and Johanna’s stories unfold between 1882 and 1885, the narrative does flash back as far as En’s journey with his family from China to San Francisco in 1860. These sections are great for story building, but they occasionally break up the flow of the main narrative with their sporadic and sometimes uneven appearances. This material lends the novel the feel of an epic, generational story, however, with Matthews’ powerful writing masterfully blending history and fiction.
A resonant novel for any reader who knows what it is to build a life in a new, sometimes unfriendly, place.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2019
ISBN: 9781732110922
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Starfish Group
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2024
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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