A strong, often poignant illustration of slavery’s destructiveness.
McLain’s character-driven debut historical novel blends a tale of ill-fated love with a scathing indictment of slavery.
In 1833, 22-year-old Cornelius Carson is a slave owner who buys a second slave for his small cotton farm in Louisiana’s Bayou Cocodrie: a small, 10-year-old girl, whom he names Jenny, who looks frail and speaks no English. She seems barely strong enough to work the fields alongside the aging Malachi, his other slave, who’s been on his farm for three years. Cornelius is courting a beautiful woman named Stephanie Coqterre of Natchez, Mississippi, and when her wealthy stepfather, Emile, refuses to give them permission to marry, they elope. However, the young bride is unprepared for life in a two-room cabin without house servants. Thus begins the self-destruction of a family—a story that makes up much of the novel’s plot. However, the heart of this narrative lies in McLain’s in-depth portrayals of Jenny and Malachi, and of the slaves on the Coqterre plantation. Jenny, who just recently arrived from Africa on a slave ship, was separated from her brother when he was sold to another family. Malachi, now with his third owner, comes from Virginia: “I was sold away from my mammy when I was twelve years old,” he tells Jenny. “And I never seen my mammy from that day to this.” As Jenny learns English and becomes a competent field worker, McLain portrays how she and Malachi interact, showing the unusual familiarity of speech between them, and how, in quiet times, they share their longing for freedom. The author also creates vivid moments of tenderness, such as when Malachi carves a doll for Jenny, or even when Cornelius tends to her blistered hands. She also effectively depicts incidents of unabashed cruelty on the larger plantations, such as when a young boy has his foot cut off when he tries to escape, or when wives are sold without their husbands.
A strong, often poignant illustration of slavery’s destructiveness.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5398-9028-7
Page Count: 358
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
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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