Stinson, whose impeccable research dominates the book, might have had more success presenting her documentation as a...
Stinson’s (Venus of Chalk, 2004, etc.) novel about the life of 18th-century theologian Jonathan Edwards offers readers a heavy-handed dose of old-time religion.
Few would agree that life in the 1700s was easy. Religious tenets were important providers of structure, guidance and comfort for American colonists. Edwards, considered one of the foremost preachers of his era, is credited with inspiring the First Great Awakening, a period of time that stirred many colonists to search for personal redemption and spurred numerous revivals throughout settlements in the New England area. Stinson attempts to capture the spirit of this time and its aftermath through Edwards’ writings and other documentation and tells the story of the Edwards family, including their two slaves, Leah and Saul, and the circumstances that lead to a final rift between Edwards and his flock. Edwards’ sermons initially create such powerful emotions that many worshippers, overwhelmed by divine visitation, are whipped into a frenzy of crying and swooning. But these experiences are soon replaced by suspicion, as some people associate the Northampton preacher with several unsettling events, including the death of a young girl, the suicide of Edwards’ uncle, a scandal involving the youth of the town and the irresponsible behavior of a family member. A nature lover, Edwards contemplates spiders and other spindly legged creatures and jots down observations as he perches in the branches of an elm tree, and his wife, Sarah, tries—and fails—to concoct curatives using spider webs. His credibility among the community waning, Edwards wonders why the sermons of visiting preachers seem to invigorate his flock while his words are met with snores. But a milestone sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” reinvigorates worshippers—at least for a short time. Edwards, though, is eventually terminated by the church council.
Stinson, whose impeccable research dominates the book, might have had more success presenting her documentation as a biography rather than attempting a fictionalized version of Edwards' life: The one-dimensional characters and excerpts from his writings are no more engaging than required reading in a high school textbook.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61873-069-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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