An ambitious, if dense, tale of a profound friendship between a boy and an enigmatic creature.
The humidity and peculiarity of the Louisiana bayous are palpable in McConnell’s dreamy fictional evocation of the life of an unusual 11-year-old boy.
Young Luc Theriot lives with his Cajun parents in the bayous outside of New Orleans in 1925. The family struggles with poverty, just scraping by due to his work selling creatures that he traps, such as crawfish and snails. He makes friends with the introspective Doc Marsh, who medically treats people and animals and also writes poetry. The story is as slow-paced as the setting in which the protagonist lives; the main plot doesn’t kick in until many pages in, when Luc finds an apparent frog that’s the size of a pig, which has “yellow-gold skin” and an extraordinarily long tongue. He names this curiosity Mustard Green, and it becomes his pet; the two soon form a tight, seemingly magical bond of friendship. Mustard Green becomes the toast of the community and leads Luc to friendships with a reformed bully and a sweet young girl who uses a leg brace. Mustard Green doesn’t mind the attention that follows and is happy to perform for curious crowds, which alleviates Luc’s family’s financial hardship. Peril arrives with men who want to steal the creature for profit and a professor who wishes to study it. This ambitious book creates atmosphere with confidence, often through dreams and poems, rather than a conventional narrative; however, the unhurried plot and oblique prose sometimes cause the story to meander and lose direction. Much of the novel explores Luc’s interior world; he’s a youngster with an old soul who navigates life with imagination and emotion: “Luc holds an almost religious belief that Human Creatures have an overriding flaw—their determination to Control Nature rather than living within it.” This outlook allows him to form a symbiotic friendship with Mustard Green, and he soon receives visions and revelations through dreams; these send him on a mission to a local pond, which provides the story’s greatest revelation.
An ambitious, if dense, tale of a profound friendship between a boy and an enigmatic creature.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2023
ISBN: 9798391774853
Page Count: 337
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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