A powerful, gripping, and unrelenting tale of wilderness survival under the most dire of circumstances in the pursuit of...
In this road novel set in the 19th century, a young black slave escapes a plantation to seek freedom in the North.
Poet, novelist, and historian Morgan has staked out a rich piece of literary territory for himself. His splendid books (The Road from Gap Creek, 2013, etc.) have portrayed a frontier Appalachian world—especially North Carolina—of hardship and perseverance. This novel explores a subject that has been just on the edges of his previous books—the African-American experience. Jonah Williams is an 18-year-old South Carolina slave who becomes a runaway in the spring of 1851. After being falsely accused of stealing a book (he taught himself to read) and viciously lashed for his offense, Jonah decides to run. With only a knife and a few coins he took from his Mama’s jar, and without any shoes, he heads into a mountainous wilderness filled with “outlaws and squatters and trash.” Using the North Star as his beacon, he heads North, where he had read Negroes were free. The novel starts deceptively slowly, with what appears to be a fairly simple narrative told in simple prose, but it’s much more. We closely follow Jonah as he confronts a world of copperheads, poison oak, hornets’ nests, and massive mountains to climb. He must learn, adapt, be resourceful and wary to survive: “A slave was never supposed to hurry, or hold his head too high.” Morgan beautifully conveys Jonah’s wistful regrets for leaving and then his constant, palpable fears. He relies on his wiles to escape from men anxious to capture him, and there are many close calls—as well as severe violence. Along the way Jonah meets a slave girl, Angel, who then runs after him, hoping she’ll find that freedom train to the North too.
A powerful, gripping, and unrelenting tale of wilderness survival under the most dire of circumstances in the pursuit of freedom: another outstanding work of historical fiction from Morgan.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56512-627-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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