An engaging novel, which successfully merges a drama and a thriller into a period piece.
A young boy’s discovery of bones on his family’s Oklahoma farm throws his life into a tailspin in Fuller’s (Decency, 2012) post–World War II novel.
In 1946, 7-year-old Joe works hard on a farm with no electricity. Power companies are looking for land, and Joe’s grandfather hears that organized crime is trying to muscle its way into the electricity business. After Joe discovers what appear to be human remains, James, a man helping at the farm, is arrested for murder. Billy Joe Parmalee, a young attorney, asks Joe if he will help him prove that James is innocent. As the story progresses, the child learns that not everyone is trustworthy. Fuller delivers a novel that’s fully engaged with its time period: Joe is in awe over such things as cameras and telephones and is impressed by a house that has not one, but two toilets conveniently located inside. The author provides the boy with a rich history—his father died during the war, and his mother, during the course of the narrative, moves to Kansas City to make a better life for herself and her son. Joe’s interactions with his family, particularly his grandpa, make for sweet moments, but the standout scenes are those with Joe and the lawyer, as the two work on James’ case. Fuller appropriately and endearingly highlights the farm’s chores; milking the cows is done so often that people use them to measure the time of day, and laundry is an all-day event. Joe comes across as a naïve, believable 7-year-old, but he also displays shrewdness and levelheadedness. He has cravings for cream sodas but also describes his anger as “sour acid rivers” that have “raged in [his] veins.” The story is written in Joe’s dialect—the phrase “might could” appears often. But the author’s stylistic bravura really drives the novel home, as he effectively uses fragmented sentences in the more intense scenes, such as Joe’s nightmare that opens the story.
An engaging novel, which successfully merges a drama and a thriller into a period piece.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478383499
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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