Russo’s version of the good old-fashioned comic novel is the gold standard, full of heart and dexterous storytelling.
Back to North Bath, New York, for a third round of misadventures, tomfoolery, and personal growth.
The demise of Donald “Sully” Sullivan, Russo’s beloved main character, in Everybody's Fool (2016), is no obstacle to the success of the author's return visit to the benighted North Bath, though at its opening the town is put out of its misery by being officially dissolved, its environs annexed to its bright and shiny neighbor, Schuyler Springs. Despite his death, Sully casts a long shadow over the doings of the remaining population: Peter, his college professor son; Rub, his old sidekick; Chief of Police Douglas Raymer, his erstwhile nemesis; Ruth, his longtime paramour—all constantly find themselves recalling his instructions and example. Though the closing of the North Bath police department puts Raymer out of a job, when a body is found at the long-shuttered Sans Souci hotel, he is sent to investigate by his former employee and on-again, off-again girlfriend: the new chief of police of Schuyler Springs, Charice Bond. Charice is attractive and Black, while middle-aged Raymer looks like “he and the Pillsbury Doughboy might have a common ancestor,” but Charice’s twin brother, Jerome, is on hand to teach Raymer a few things he needs to know about the Black experience. In other news, a third generation of Sullivan shows up in town—Peter's son Thomas, from whom he has been long estranged. Thomas looks a lot like his brother Will, the only one of the boys Peter raised, now abroad on a Fulbright scholarship as a result of advantages that Thomas and his younger brother lacked and about which they are bitterly resentful. Another three-generation plotline involves the thorny relationships among Ruth, her daughter, Janey, and her granddaughter, Tina. Bad cops, bigotry, partner violence, nefarious schemes, and confusing therapy sessions aside, almost all of the characters experience significant improvements in their self-concepts, relationships, and circumstances. The king is dead, long live the king!
Russo’s version of the good old-fashioned comic novel is the gold standard, full of heart and dexterous storytelling.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780593317891
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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