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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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