A disjointed tale told with skill but also with ample use of dialect that may put off some readers.
Newsome tells the stories of a 19th-century slave boy and a family trying to get by in a contemporary North Carolina island community.
The Edwards children, Callie and Jeffy, are enjoying a vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when their parents take them to Hiatt Plantation so they can learn about slavery. After the family arrives at the plantation, the novel jumps back in time to that of Sammy, one of its young slaves. Newsome, the author of Joe Peas (2016), here tells Sammy’s story, making frequent use of dialect that may not be to everyone’s taste. Too frail for the fields, Sammy (called “Sambo” by his slave master) winds up working in the Hiatt house. But his brother Johnny is killed by a snakebite in the fields. To avoid that fate, Sammy runs away and takes his brother’s name to avoid suspicion. He is joined by a parrot that has also escaped the Hiatt house, and they end up at sea on a boat that raids other ships looking, in part, for treasure. This is where Newsome’s writing shines. He is especially adept at capturing seafaring dangers, including the risks that arise when a British warship closes in on Johnny’s ship and fires its cannon during a storm: “By now the ship was wallowing into troughs between the waves so deep that the crests of the waves could not be seen above the hull.” When Johnny and his bird are shipwrecked on a coastal island, the action shifts to the present and a family that has just moved to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Four-year-old J.J. befriends what seems to be Johnny’s spirit, who J.J.’s older siblings, Benji and Kelsey, think is an imaginary friend. J.J.’s dad, James, finds work at a nursing home and brings Benji to volunteer. They cross paths with an old grifter named Charles Murphy, and when Benji finds a bit of treasure, Murphy swoops in. Both the historical and present-day stories are entertaining, and their plots have some symmetry. Newsome doesn’t quite nail the transition when he brings Johnny’s story into the present, but by then readers may be too absorbed in the story to mind. Given the youth of its characters, this novel might appeal most to children or young teenagers who are ready for mature content, such as a reference to a “sexual liaison” and an auction featuring a naked slave.
A disjointed tale told with skill but also with ample use of dialect that may put off some readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2020
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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