FORTY MARTYRS

Name: FORTY MARTYRS
Author: Philip F. Deaver
ISBN: 978-1-941681-94-7

by Philip F. Deaver ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 29, 2016

While reducing the stories to mere summaries makes them sound like either clichés or soap operas, Deaver’s solicitude—and...

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Nine loosely linked stories—or perhaps one loosely episodic novel—about infidelity, alcoholism, insanity, and other small-town ills, all told brilliantly and with humor and great compassion.

The narrative voice Deaver creates here is never judgmental but rather understanding, tolerant, and always curious about what incidents will next unfold. The drama plays out in the unlikely venue of Tuscola, Illinois, a small college town that contains almost more turmoil than one can process. In the opening story, “Vasco and the Virgin,” Vasco Whirly—a former professor who becomes a coal miner when he doesn’t get tenure—has a vision of the Virgin Mary. His estranged wife thinks he’s delusional and takes his young daughters away from him, but at the end of the story, in a final vision, Vasco has an epiphany of humanity worthy of Flannery O’Connor. Three major recurring characters we come to know throughout the stories are Lowell Wagner, professor of psychology (and also the local therapist and keeper of many of the townspeople’s secrets), his friend Wally, and Wally’s wife, Carol, a talented pianist marooned in the backwater of Tuscola. She has several affairs and moves in and out of a friendship with Veronica, Lowell’s wife. The title story alludes to the Forty Martyrs Catholic Church, whose priest, Father Randall Kelleher, not only hears confessions from parishioners like Wally (who's assaulted Carol with a knife), but also has to put up with the indignities of a church robbery. Eventually, when Lowell abruptly leaves Tuscola for a four-week rehab program, Veronica has a brief fling with Howard Packer, a Vietnam vet she hired to do some work around the house while Lowell is away.

While reducing the stories to mere summaries makes them sound like either clichés or soap operas, Deaver’s solicitude—and even love—for his characters elevates them to the level of beauty.

Pub Date: March 29, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-941681-94-7

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Burrow Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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EAST OF EDEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 1952

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

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Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.

Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952

ISBN: 0142004235

Page Count: 616

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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.