Promising but unfocused, this finely wrought debut novel would’ve benefited from more ruthless editing.
Amid family tragedy, a young man flees the peculiar home of his youth only to return years later.
Thomas Wolfe may have warned that “you can’t go home again,” but the Asters of Old Buckram, North Carolina, apparently didn’t get the message. The narrator’s father, Henry, is a strange fit for this “achromatic town high in the belly of the Appalachian Mountains.” A boozy and bookish writer, he’s returned to his hometown to continue crafting his magnum opus and raise his family in a sprawling, eerie estate built into the side of a mountain. His son, also Henry, tells his dad’s story and, mostly, his own: from his father’s permanent abandonment of the family to his own abandonment of Old Buckram for college and law school to his eventual return. The writing is pleasant and often funny, and Henry’s memories of his youth are rich and complex (the town preacher’s attempted public burning of a copy of As I Lay Dying, thwarted by Henry the elder, is particularly memorable). The characters, including young Henry’s sister, Threnody, and his eventual love interest, Story, are well-drawn, and Lewis is a master of creating a sense of place (the title refers to a mysterious plot of land in Old Buckram where “nothing of natural origin will grow except a creeping gray moss”). Ultimately, though, the story is too unfocused to hold readers’ attention. Each of Henry’s reminiscences, on its own, is interesting, but there are too many anecdotes for the narrative to pick up steam. Late-in-the-game secondary plotlines and twists only further dilute an otherwise powerful story.
Promising but unfocused, this finely wrought debut novel would’ve benefited from more ruthless editing.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49564-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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