A funny, endearing tale anchored by an impeccably drawn narrator.
Kern tells the story of country music through the eyes of an unlikely producer in this debut novel.
In 1927, 15-year-old Mickey Derow is just looking for an escape when he jumps into an idling Cadillac in New York City. He’s just stolen a salesman’s case of ribbons and is running from the cops, but the men in the Cadillac mistake him for a young recording expert they’re expecting and take him along on their journey to Tennessee. As Mickey puts it, “What I’d got involved in, turned out, was a hunt for singing hillbillies.” In Bristol, Tennessee, the hapless Mickey helps (and hinders) his new employers’ efforts to record amateur musicians for the Victor record company. The talent includes future luminaries like Jimmie Rodgers and Maybelle Carter. The singer who really steals Mickey’s heart, however, is 12-year-old Ida Valentine, whose song isn’t even good enough to get preserved in wax. When the Victor men go back to New York, Mickey volunteers to stay behind and help discover new talent for the emerging record industry—and, of course, find Ida. What follows is a Candide-esque adventure through eight decades of country music as Mickey rises to become a producer of note, pining all the while for love of sweet Ida Valentine. Kern is a writer of enormous talents: in Mickey Derow, she’s created an all-American protagonist in the tradition of Studs Lonigan, Billy Bathgate, and Forrest Gump. His voice is an infectious blend of pluck and naiveté, grit and vulnerability. Through his use of language he seeks to beat the world (and himself) into submission: “I’d seen the waves punching and clawing and climbing over each other, just to be the first to smash their brains out on the sand; and then sliding away beat but never defeated, coming right back for another try….They reminded me of me.” While Mickey’s story is littered with many of the unlikely coincidences that propel this brand of winking historical fiction, Kern imbues the peculiarities of country music with a verve that will make even nonfans appreciate the culture as they read.
A funny, endearing tale anchored by an impeccably drawn narrator.Pub Date: May 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-48-402768-4
Page Count: 316
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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