Lock deftly tells a visceral story of belief and conflict, with abundant moments of tragedy and transcendence along the way.
A man with a long connection to Emily Dickinson loses his faith in the midst of battle.
Narrator Robert Winter is a chaplain in the United States Army in the mid-19th century—giving him a firsthand view of the fracturing of society leading to the Civil War. The novel is structured as Robert’s correspondence with Dickinson, whose ideals and aesthetics serve as a contrast to his own loss of faith. Lock does a fine job of making Winter feel like a man of his time: Though he’s progressive by the standards of a white man of his day, his blind spots are pointed out by some, including a young Samuel Clemens. As he moves from conflict to conflict, Robert’s own mind becomes more tortured. “There is no way to tell of it in words,” he writes, regarding war, before offering up a grotesque metaphor. The novel is enlivened by signs that Robert is, while not an unreliable narrator, possibly a selective one. Several major life events happen to him in passing between two of the book’s sections, and his own (chronologically) first encounter with Dickinson isn’t revealed on the page until a good distance into the book—which, in turn, prompts the reader to re-evaluate some of the pair’s earlier interactions. Although this is the story of Robert’s growing loss of faith, he shows a propensity for using Jesus’ life as a metaphor for his own. As with each installment of Lock’s The American Novels series (A Fugitive in Walden Woods, 2017, etc.), this work stands on its own entirely well, though readers of his prior books will find connections both thematic and literal.
Lock deftly tells a visceral story of belief and conflict, with abundant moments of tragedy and transcendence along the way.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-942658-38-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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