Plenty to groove on, despite some dull stretches.
Debut author Gudinski presents a story of music and time travel.
Rhiannon Karlson is an 18-year-old in Fresno, California, in the year 2000. She loves playing the drums, and her classic rock cover band is pretty good. They’re so good, in fact, that a record label wants to sign them to a lucrative contract. Rhiannon’s mom, however, hates rock music, and the regular shouting matches between mother and daughter are heated. Everything changes when Rhiannon smokes a powerful hallucinogenic crystal that transports her to 1969 San Francisco. As luck would have it, she happens upon a rock band called the Day Trippers who need a drummer. So begins her journey that involves hippies, drugs, and lots and lots of music. She meets singer-songwriter Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, drops acid in Golden Gate Park, and as a high-water mark, takes a trip across the country with the Day Trippers to Woodstock. But as the band reaches a modicum of success, trouble lurks just around the corner. There’s also the larger question of whether Rhiannon will ever return to her own time. Some readers may take exception to the fact that the protagonist doesn’t seem to care that her actions in the past could have consequences on the future. Nevertheless, Gudinski doesn’t dwell on such details, instead putting the focus on Rhiannon’s long, strange trip through the titular year. The book deftly describes the excitement around Woodstock and the many voices in its crowd, as when one concertgoer exclaims, “I am He and He is me, we are three—Exist!” The problem is that Rhiannon doesn’t really deal with very much of significance over the course of the tale, and a jolly old drifter and an agitated hitchhiker that she meets along the way seem like little more than stereotypes. It’s only post-Woodstock that the groovy days begin to waver. The real question that will keep readers’ attention is what Rhiannon will do with these experiences. Will it all be forgotten in modern times?
Plenty to groove on, despite some dull stretches.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-48779-3
Page Count: 569
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2019
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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