An intense and intelligently crafted story about overcoming life’s most extreme trials.
Boyd’s novel follows a young boy whose life is slowly overtaken by tragedy and poverty.
The narrative begins with the first of many traumatic moments as Timothy Valentine II, or “Junior,” relates his memories of his mother’s funeral, which occurred when he was 8 years old. (It was the same day he learned why his father stabbed her to death—he was angry that she tried to leave.) Junior moves in with his vivacious grandmother, who tries to keep him on a path to righteousness and responsibility, but a second tragedy leaves him in the care of his Aunt Claire. Junior and his only friend, a small cat named Ms. Kelly, move from the Virginia countryside to the inner city of Richmond, where he explores the world of Aunt Claire’s rough, impoverished neighborhood, which he sees as a maze of identical buildings and “lots of dead ends.” Beset by violent bullying and the aggressive indifference of his cousins, Junior’s sweet disposition soon melts away. He adopts the attitude of the neighborhood: “You had to hustle to eat.” Drugs and guns replace kittens and Bible verses in Junior’s world, but he remains friends with one good influence, a sweet young girl named Truly. But as Junior starts to lose himself completely to violence, more tragedy looms for them all on the horizon. Through Junior’s first-person narration, Boyd brings a sense of realistic restraint to each shocking event—readers feel how desensitized Junior becomes to the procession of horrors via his matter-of-fact reporting about deaths, fights, and drug abuse. The author strikes a delicate and fascinating balance between the mindset of the child enduring these situations and the older narrator reflecting on them. (“It didn’t dawn on me,” Junior muses while contemplating his acquiescence to peer pressure, “that I was thinking like an animal.”) The string of increasingly terrible events finally leads to a breaking point and a conclusion that feels too abrupt given the novel’s otherwise slow and methodical pacing, but along the way Boyd provides readers with plenty of touching, beautiful, and troubling observations about family, friendship, and grief.
An intense and intelligently crafted story about overcoming life’s most extreme trials.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2025
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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