A first novel that affectingly details the bittersweet last summer of childhood, often treating the grimmer events—polio, race, and death—with a cursory, even jaunty vigor. “Tab” (Tabitha) Rutland, the narrator, lives in a small Alabama town. It’s 1954, school is over, and summer stretches ahead. Though this is Tab’s favorite season, it’s also polio time, and, as a precaution, swimming pools and the movie house are closed. Tab, a sixth grader, is enjoying an era when boys are still only fellow football players, not potential dates, and when fun is imagining you—re Roy Rogers, building forts. With her new friend Maudie, the daughter of a neighbor’s African-American maid, Tab builds “Fort Polio” in a kudzu vine thicket where the two observe the transactions of the local moonshine maker; Tab takes a dangerous fishing trip to make money so Maudie can buy school supplies; and she gets caught up in the less benevolent side of town life. Meanwhile, Tab’s “intellectual” mother doesn’t get on with her mother-in-law or the locals. In fact, Tab looks on as Mrs. Poovey, head of the prestigious Ladies Help League that collects money for polio victims, humiliatingly rejects her mother’s application for membership. A neighbor dies suddenly and John, her clever young son, a friend of Tab’s, must move in with relatives who don’t appreciate his brilliance. And it is Tab who discovers, when Mrs. Poovey suddenly leaves town, the scandalous reason for her departure. But only when school starts, and Maudie comes down with polio and is sent away, never to be seen again, does Tab realize her childhood has ended. Despite some unevenness, a coming-of-age story that deftly evokes a time of blissfully ordinary comforts.
Pub Date: Jan. 27, 1999
ISBN: 0-446-52388-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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