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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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