Striking, if uneven, historical fiction that chronicles a difficult period in American history.
An impeccably researched debut novel that chronicles a West Texas family’s struggle through the Great Depression.
In 1921, high-spirited, impetuous teenager “Skitchy” Chapman lives with her parents, Ephraim and Kate; her brother, Buddy; and her sister, Belle, on the family’s ranch in Reeves County, Texas. But once Skitchy starts attending barn dances with her older brother and sister, she grows up quickly. She soon falls for an outsider named Pink Campbell, a trumpet player in the barn-dance band, who came to Reeves County to try his hand at farming cotton. Skitchy’s parents initially disapprove of the match, but Pink’s support through a crisis gains her family’s respect, and the two marry; Belle marries a local man, Jackson Tieger. Skitchy farms cotton with Pink, and Belle and Jackson move to a neighboring town, where Jackson has inherited a run-down hotel. Entrepreneurial, enthusiastic Skitchy hates the isolation of the farm; she struggles to understand Pink’s lack of ambition and wonders about the future of their marriage. When the owners of the Campbells’ cotton farm sell the land, Belle and Jackson invite Skitchy and Pink to move into their hotel and help run it. The two couples weather the Great Depression in the hotel, living through childbirths, marital difficulties, business ventures, racial conflict and dust storms together. All four are changed by the passage of time—and one of the marriages doesn’t survive. McDonald depicts the lonely, arid West Texas landscape with an evocative, spare touch; her obvious talent makes the overly florid depictions of sex more glaring. McDonald devotes each chapter to a single year and covers the period between 1921 and 1943; this narrative choice helps move the story along, but it sometimes feels forced—particularly in the first half, when many chapters consist of only a few scenes. McDonald’s story, and her realistic, nuanced characters, would likely have been better served by jettisoning the emphasis on chronology and developing fewer, more fleshed-out chapters.
Striking, if uneven, historical fiction that chronicles a difficult period in American history.Pub Date: July 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1621416951
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2013
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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