Lonely women in hushed bedrooms form the dominant image in a disjointed work that, aside from that brief elopement, is also...
Old family scandals are revisited by a South African woman in this seventh novel from the expatriate South African writer (Bluebird, or The Invention of Happiness, 2007, etc.).
She’s the pretty daughter of a diamond appraiser in Johannesburg. He works alongside her father. They’re still in their teens, but it’s love at first sight. She’s a Christian, he’s a Jew, a huge problem. They elope in a borrowed Chevy and head for her father’s hometown, stopping only to make love at a hotel. She hopes the aunts she remembers so fondly will shelter them. Wrong call. The three maiden ladies are horrified by the scandal (it’s 1925) and call her parents. Her father arrives and ends their romance. Isaac leaves defiantly, Bill remains behind, her aunts’ prisoner. Kohler has featured Bill (her childhood tomboy name) before, in her 1994 novel The House on R Street. Nine months later, Bill gives birth and her baby is snatched away, sold to adoptive parents. This is the only dramatic episode in a limp novel, so it’s unfortunate that it’s cut up into pieces, sandwiched between events 10 and 30 years later. The scandal has stayed buried until 1956, when Bill discloses it to her teenage sons. In the interim, there has been a second scandal. In 1935, Bill is hired as a companion to a wealthy woman, a lonely alcoholic whose businessman husband is often away. Mark, the sexually voracious husband, pursues Bill, who insists he first divorce Helen before marrying her. After the marriage, the three continue living together in an improbable ménage. Then Helen dies, and Bill becomes a heavy drinker too. Had she ever loved Mark? Readers will find it difficult to tell from the distanced narration. As for the eponymous love child, don’t hold your breath; she doesn’t appear till the very end.
Lonely women in hushed bedrooms form the dominant image in a disjointed work that, aside from that brief elopement, is also passionless.Pub Date: June 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-14-311919-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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