A thoughtful dramatization of the moral complexities of the War Between the States.
A Civil War–era novel about a slaveholding farmer and two of his slaves.
Robert Stafford is a successful planter who lives on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia. Like his neighbors, he owns slaves, but in other ways, he’s unusually dismissive of cultural conventions. He marries one of his servants, Zabette, and because interracial marriage is illegal in Georgia, Robert relocates her and their children to Connecticut, where laws afford them greater protection. Although the Civil War is largely a remote affair for him, with minimal impact upon the island, the danger is getting closer. Union forces invade the nearby port of Fernandina—an unexpected move that sows seeds of future chaos. Later, a Union naval blockade compels Robert to stealthily ship his goods via a blockade runner, a risky venture. Furthermore, Confederate forces abandon East Florida, leaving the island essentially defenseless against violent looters known as “regulators.” The upheaval of the war is witnessed not only by Robert, but also Amos and Amelia, twin slaves who treat Robert as if he were their father. The most transformative changes, however, come at the conclusion of the war, as most of Robert’s slaves leave, and others threaten vengeance. Debut author Stevens sensitively captures the uneasy tension of Robert’s skewed moral outlook. When the slaves are emancipated, he’s shown to be genuinely surprised when many run away and others turn on him, and he expresses this in terms of astonished pique: “I treat my slaves well….No one on this plantation is mistreated. And now, with the bell of freedom ringing loud and clear, they leave...to go where?” In this way, the book effectively shows the clear limits of a slave owner’s progressiveness and exposes the moral untenability of such a position. The perspectives of Amos and Amelia—who eventually taste freedom—are also insightfully rendered. Despite the novel’s brevity, it also astutely provides a wealth of historical information regarding such events as the Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution.
A thoughtful dramatization of the moral complexities of the War Between the States.Pub Date: April 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-8970-4
Page Count: 170
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2017
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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