An overly schematic approach to what could have been a fascinating retelling of history.
Beanland imagines how the devastating Richmond Theater fire, which killed 72 people on December 26, 1811, impacted several survivors, some more fictionalized than others.
The novel, which faithfully follows the recorded facts, begins backstage at the theater, where a teenage stagehand raises a chandelier lit with candles that sets the scenery on fire. Soon theatergoers are rushing to escape. Patrick Henry’s daughter Sally Henry Campbell, at the time a 31-year-old widow, selflessly saves those around her before jumping from a window. While nursing wounded survivors over the next few days, she learns that men she knew deliberately trampled over women to get to the stairs, and she concludes that White men of her privileged class are morally bankrupt in their behavior toward both White women and enslaved Black people. While Sally is trapped inside the theater, Gilbert Hunt, an enslaved blacksmith who has secretly learned to read and write, stands outside catching women who jump. While Gilbert is touted as a hero and one of the women he saved raises money to pay for his manumission, the theater company, afraid to take the blame itself, spreads rumors pinning responsibility for the fire on a “slave rebellion.” (The actual Gilbert, though also lauded, actually purchased his freedom years later.) Soon the slave patrol, headed by Gilbert’s owner, is rounding up Black people. Meanwhile, Gilbert’s niece Cecily Patterson decides that the fire, specifically all the bodies burned beyond recognition, might spell freedom if her owners believe she died. Beanland adeptly jumps among the characters’ stories and delights in conveying details of everyday life in 1811 Virginia. But she's heavy-handed in using the story to emphasize the evils of slavery, racism, and sexism. Locked within the author’s political message, characters like the progressive Sally, saintly Gilbert, and a variety of evil White men lack dimension. Only the young stagehand Jack Gibson is allowed to express the human complexity of moral decision-making as his sense of right conflicts with loyalty to his theatrical family.
An overly schematic approach to what could have been a fascinating retelling of history.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781982186142
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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