An intimate fictionalization of a dark incident from Colonial history.
Renner’s debut novel uses her ancestor’s life story to reflect on the paranoia and persecution in Massachusetts during the Salem witch trials.
Rebecca Blake Eames (1641-1721) was Renner’s ninth great-grandmother. The novel opens in 1692 on a familiar scene: slave woman Tituba is showing two girls a folk magic trick. All seems harmless until the girls start convulsing—apparently victims of witchcraft. This incident, which sparked Salem’s witch trials, is best known through Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Renner’s parallel story is set in nearby Andover, Massachusetts, where news of these strange afflictions arrived months ago. A feud between the Swan and Eames families comes to a head when Rebecca curses the patriarch publicly: “Damn you, Robert Swan!...And may the devil himself visit your home!” Her seeming familiarity with the devil leads to her arrest on charges of witchcraft, and she and her son, Daniel, are thrown in a dungeon. Renner paints a harrowing picture of primitive prison life. Beatings, fleas and slop buckets are only the beginning; worse, Rebecca suspects that 4-year-old Dorcas Good, also imprisoned, has been sexually assaulted. Through flashbacks, readers learn that Rebecca believes she is being punished for committing adultery early in her marriage. She fakes a confession about her involvement with Satan and is sentenced to hang with eight others. She’s saved by chance—they are one noose short. The prose memorably uses period props, as in “the breeze extinguished the tallow candle.” Renner’s deep research is especially evident in descriptions of illnesses; she writes of “jail fever,” apoplexy and gangrene, which necessitates a grisly amputation. Historical figures like Cotton Mather and Judge Hathorne fit in neatly, and the close third-person narration allows access to Rebecca’s and her husband’s thoughts. A subplot about their daughter Dorothy’s romance with Samuel Swan and her foiled abduction by Indians sputters but doesn’t distract from the central tale.
An intimate fictionalization of a dark incident from Colonial history.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491705957
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it doesn't feel much like an adult novel, this book will be welcomed by any Blume fan who can handle three real...
A beloved author returns with a novel built around a series of real-life plane crashes in her youth.
Within 58 days in the winter of 1951-'52, three aircraft heading into or outbound from Newark Airport crashed in the neighboring town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, taking 116 lives. Blume (Summer Sisters, 1998, etc.), who was a teenager there at the time, has woven a story that mingles facts about the incidents and the victims—among them, Robert Patterson, secretary of war under Truman—with the imagined lives of several families of fictional characters. Though it's not always clear where truth ends and imagination begins, the 15-year-old protagonist, Miri Ammerman, is a classic Blume invention. Miri lives with her single mother, Rusty, her grandmother Irene, and her uncle Henry, a young journalist who makes his reputation reporting on the tragedies for the Elizabeth Daily Post. In addition to the crashes, one of which she witnesses firsthand, Miri faces drama with her mom, her best friend, the adviser of her school newspaper, and her first real boyfriend, an Irish kid who lives in an orphanage. Nostalgic details of life in the early '50s abound: from 17-inch Zeniths ("the biggest television Miri had ever seen") to movie-star haircuts ("She looked older, but nothing like Elizabeth Taylor") to popular literature—"Steve was reading that new book The Catcher in the Rye. Christina had no idea what the title meant. Some of the girls went on dates to Staten Island, where you could be legally served at 18....The Catcher in the Rye and Ginger Ale." The book begins and ends with a commemorative gathering in 1987, giving us a peek at the characters' lives 35 year later, complete with shoulder pads and The Prince of Tides.
Though it doesn't feel much like an adult novel, this book will be welcomed by any Blume fan who can handle three real tragedies and a few four-letter words.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87504-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Urgent moral questions underlie a captivating mystery.
Sequestered at a boarding school during World War II, a rebellious teenager confronts secrets, lies, and danger.
Published in Hungary in 1970, and translated into English for the first time by Rix, this intricately plotted novel by Prix Femina Étranger winner Szabó (1917-2007) (Katalin Street, 2017, etc.) complicates a predictable coming-of-age tale by setting it in perilous times: War rages, patriotism incites bitterness and bigotry, and a clandestine resistance movement stealthily arises. When 14-year-old Gina is sent suddenly from her home in Budapest to an elite religious school in the provinces, she feels deeply bereft: of her beloved governess, who was forced to return to her native France; of her aunt’s delightful tea dances; of encounters with a handsome lieutenant with whom she is infatuated; and, most of all, of her father, whom she loves so deeply that she “felt the world complete only when they were together.” Protected, indulged, and self-absorbed, Gina suffers protracted (and somewhat irritating) adolescent angst. She hates the academy: Once a medieval monastery, it looms like a fortress; girls, dressed in black uniforms, their hair braided unfashionably, are forbidden to bring jewelry, scented soaps, or even toothbrushes from home. Obedience to Christian precepts and school authority is strictly enforced—and, by Gina, repeatedly flouted. She breaks rules, antagonizes her teachers and classmates, and mocks rituals and traditions, including the girls’ veneration of a statue they call Abigail, which has the uncanny power to know everything that happens at the school and offer warnings and sage advice. “All my life I have been a wild thing,” Gina reflects. “I am impatient and impulsive, and I have never learned to love people who annoy me or try to hurt me.” But when her father, visiting unexpectedly, reveals the reason he had to send her away, she vows to behave and realizes that Abigail is watching over her. Far from a supernatural being, Abigail’s real identity, Gina believes, is “someone inside these fortress walls who lives a secret life.”
Urgent moral questions underlie a captivating mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68137-403-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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