An ambitious social novel that struggles to fold in its protagonist’s personal travails.
A woman fights for racial justice and female ordination in Hilsabeck’s debut novel.
Lily Vida Wallace, who’s White, grew up in Greenville, Texas, where threats of violence against Black people were commonplace. In the early 1970s, the adult Lily moves to New York City to work with the Episcopal Church, whose members are known for assisting Freedom Riders and others working for the civil rights movement. In 1973, Sam Jefferson, a Black church sexton, is murdered in South Carolina, and Lily travels there on behalf of the presiding bishop to attend the man’s funeral, and she stares Southern racism in the face for the first time in years: “This whole history of violence,” she fumes. “It’s like exploding shrapnel. The pain has to be lodged in every American whether they realize it or not. How can life just go on when something like this happens?” The trip jump-starts Lily’s personal reckoning, which involves an engagement to a man that falls apart spectacularly; a new relationship with Rodney Davis, a Black lawyer and the brother of one of her co-workers; and her desire to break the tradition of exclusively male Episcopal priests. However, even as history marches on into the 1980s and ’90s, Lily and Rodney find out that familiar threats of violence remain. Over the course of this historical novel, Hilsabeck’s prose is vivid and urgent, as when Lily first arrives back in South Carolina and has a visceral reaction to those who surround her at the Episcopal church: “Looking around the nave at faces familiar as a family reunion, Lily panicked, as disjunction gave way to kinship, and disengagement to complicity.” The plot is slow-paced, although it effectively leads up to a truly shocking final act. Lily’s story of self-actualization feels uncomfortably shoehorned into the overarching narrative of racist violence. However, Hilsabeck does succeed at dramatizing the relationship between religion and activism in a particular era as well as the tensions surrounding the ordination of Episcopal priests.
An ambitious social novel that struggles to fold in its protagonist’s personal travails.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-077-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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