A revelatory novel that offers an evocative account of the lives of Appalachian working women.
A young woman in Appalachia battles poverty, discrimination and her own insecurity in this moving and memorable third novel from Gilmore (Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, 2008, etc.).
In 1974, when Emmalee Bullard gets a job sewing collars at the Tennewa shirt factory, the 16-year-old begins the escape from the miserable poverty in which she was raised. After her mother died years ago, her care fell to her father, Nolan, a handsome, angry drunkard who barely kept her fed or clothed (her schoolteacher took to bathing her in the janitor’s closet). At Tennewa, she is seated next to Leona, a secretive woman, broken from the death of her baby boy years ago. Childless, Leona and Curtis still live in the starter trailer they bought as newlyweds; she takes in extra sewing, and he devotes his life to their church. Leona is hard, but she is the closest thing Emmalee has had to mothering care in years, and so, when, three years later, Emmalee has a baby she calls Kelly Faye, Leona invites them to live at the trailer. Tragedy strikes the day before they’re to move in: Curtis and Leona are killed in a car accident. The funeral director allows Emmalee to sew Leona’s burying dress, so she drops Kelly Faye off at her uncle’s (his childless wife can’t wait to get her hands on the baby) and goes to the trailer to work on Leona’s dress. There, she sees the room Leona prepared: a bed and a crib, baby toys and books, small sweet clothes Leona sewed herself. Heartbroken, Emmalee sews the dress out of red damask and then becomes ill. When she goes to retrieve Kelly Faye, her uncle refuses to give her back, claiming the baby would be better off with them and all they can offer. Shunned by the community, Emmalee’s not sure she’s fit to be a mother, but then a surprising thing happens—the women of Tennewa begin to stand behind her.
A revelatory novel that offers an evocative account of the lives of Appalachian working women.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-88621-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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