Nicely woven: Devoto captures the internal ambivalence of a society teetering on the uneasy verge of change.
Two childhood friends, one white, one black, confront desegregation.
In 1954, Tab Rutland, a white girl descended from Klan founders, was separated from her childhood friend Maudie, the black daughter of a neighbor’s maid, when Maudie got polio and was sent away for treatment. Here, in her third outing, Devoto (My Last Days as Roy Rogers, 1999) revisits Tab and Maudie and follows them through a summer that will change both forever. Tab and Maudie are out of touch, though Tab’s life has gone on much as it had been. She drinks floats downtown. She’s reluctant to spend time with Aunt Eugenia, a family oddity whose many eccentricities include traveling to India and living in Berkeley. Yet when Eugenia deposits Tab and her sister Tina at an activist camp in the mountains—and to the frontlines of the Civil Rights movement—Tab is forced to grapple with who she’s becoming. Meanwhile, Maudie has spent several years in the colored people’s polio hospital growing into a polished teenager with a leg brace and a bit of wanderlust. She doesn’t much care about desegregation efforts, but when she hears that a job teaching at a voting school will let her out of the hospital, she returns to a one-room church near her (and Tab’s) hometown. As Maudie slowly gains the trust of her congregation, she dares to dream bigger and bigger dreams—among them building a voter-registration float for a town parade. Still, as both Tab and Maudie find, it’s dangerous to stir up progressive sentiments, and, despite all the slow drawls and fried peach pies, a very real violence lurks beneath the surface of these sleepy Southern towns. Is the South doomed to remain separated? Are Tab and Maudie? As the summer heats up, the complexities deepen, while Tab and Maudie unknowingly circle each other’s lives.
Nicely woven: Devoto captures the internal ambivalence of a society teetering on the uneasy verge of change.Pub Date: June 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-57696-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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 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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