A stylish and contemplative historical novel, considerate of facts but not burdened by them.
A newspaper editor is at odds with both his city and his next-door neighbor in early Jim Crow–era South Carolina.
Robinson (Sparta, 2013, etc.) mines the story of her great-grandparents for this bracing historical novel, using actual diary entries, letters, and newspaper articles. But though the story is set mainly in the 1880s, its themes are up-to-the-minute; Robinson uses lynchings, duels, and sexual assaults to shed light on populism and toxic masculinity. Frank Dawson is the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, which has agitated against the region’s racist violence since Reconstruction. (A well-turned scene depicts a bloody standoff between black soldiers and resentful whites in 1876 that led to a massacre.) Frank’s anti-lynching stance loses him readers to a rival paper. He’s facing troubles on the homefront as well. Frank’s wife, Sarah, a child of the New Orleans gentry that’s fallen victim to poverty and the Civil War, is losing her grip on her young maid and governess, Hélène, who's pursuing a disastrous relationship with the corrupt doctor next door, Thomas McDow, a man scheming to have his wife and father-in-law killed. Such plotlines could easily regress into a lurid, exploitative tale (and, perhaps inevitably, McDow never quite shakes a Snidely Whiplash demeanor), but Robinson handles the material judiciously, using the Dawsons’ lives as points in a larger map of civic dysfunction. (She integrates contemporary news stories of murders between chapters to evoke a wider atmosphere of unease.) Robinson suggests that bigotry has trickle-down effects in terms of race, gender, and everyday conduct. All this converges in a climax that's surprising but, given Robinson’s careful integration of history and imagination, feels inevitable.
A stylish and contemplative historical novel, considerate of facts but not burdened by them.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-13521-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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