Imperfect, then, but powerful and thoughtful.
From the talented and ambitious Askew (The Mercy Seat, 1997), a second novel set in her native state of Oklahoma, this time a tale of primal guilt and racial intolerance during the oil boom.
In 1920 Tulsa, Althea Dedham is known as the spoiled wife of Franklin, an oil speculator who may finally have found his big strike down by the Deep Fork River. This is also the site of Althea’s impoverished childhood and of the ghastly birth, in 1900, of her brother Japheth, whose unwelcome arrival at the Dedham home sets in motion a chain of events that will reach apocalyptic fruition in the Tulsa race riot of 1921. Japheth, we quickly learn, is Trouble: he rapes Althea’s black maid, Graceful; he incites Franklin and partner Jim Dee Logan against each other; and he lies in wait for the part–Native American, part-black woman who actually owns the land Delo Petroleum is drilling so he can force her to sign her rights over to him. Iola Tiger also happens to be the midwife who saved newborn Japheth from death at the hands of his sister Althea. That’s a lot of coincidence for one novel to bear, but Askew isn’t interested in plausibility; our responsibility to and for other human beings is her principal theme here. She’s brave enough to make her protagonist initially unlikable: Althea bullies Graceful to assuage her own sense of worthlessness and heedlessly wanders into Tulsa’s black district, too immersed in her personal wretchedness and blinkered in her privileges to understand why three African-American men are terrified to have a weeping white woman in their offices. Althea’s moral growth into Graceful’s ally is intellectually satisfying, if not particularly moving; in general, the characters are strongly observed and truthfully drawn, but viewed from a distance. The mythic elements, like Iola’s first-person narrative and Japheth’s transformation from Bad News into Evil Incarnate, are also rendered somewhat unconvincing by this lack of emotional connection. Still, the gruesome finale makes a blistering indictment of white racism without ever uttering a didactic word, and there are haunting images throughout.
Imperfect, then, but powerful and thoughtful.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-88843-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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