A balanced and evocative saga of everyday American life after the war.
A thoroughly enjoyable sequel to Worthy’s Town (2000): an anecdotal story featuring the rascals and waifs of Depression-era small-town Illinois.
When last we saw Worthy and Cappy Giberson, the father and son (though he and the late Willa raised the boy; Cappy is really Worthy’s grandson) were about to part ways as young Cappy prepared to put his storytelling skills to use as a journalism major in college. Now, WWII is over and Cappy is out of school, returning to Old Kane to look for work at an area paper. Also reappearing is Drayton Hunt, just released from prison, and, so he claims, a changed man. Drayton, Cappy’s biological father (Cappy’s unmarried teenage mother died in childbirth), is hoping to finally reconcile with his son, but more than a jailhouse conversion and a promise to be good are required for the bitter young man, who blames Hunt for the death of his mother and best friend. Meanwhile, long-lost brother Tick (gorgeous to look at but a bit soft in the head) is done assisting the flamboyant traveling evangelist Reverend Art (while also serving as the Reverend’s bed-warmer) is making his way home, having given up on God and looking forward to farming with Worthy. With all characters converging on Old Kane, the dust begins to stir: Drayton seeks Bible lessons from the local preacher, who has a far-too-appreciative eye for Drayton’s slim physique; Cappy begins a hesitant flirtation with the headstrong Oleeta; an African-American woman may be somewhere in the town passing for white; and a young girl is raped, with all gossiping fingers wrongly pointed at Drayton Hunt. All the while Cappy is scraping by as a freelancer, sending these stories to a St. Louis paper, hoping for his big break as a writer. Rolens is a subtle narrator, exposing the prejudices and provinciality of Old Kane (the whole town just loves the amateur minstrel show they put on) along with a seamier side of life that even quaint rural living has no immunity from.
A balanced and evocative saga of everyday American life after the war.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-882593-75-8
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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