An unforgettable story that hauntingly captures the American South during its most turbulent era.
In the wake of the Civil War, a woman’s forbidden romance has life-shattering consequences.
Eleanor “Maitie” Maitland Forrester is born and raised in the Piedmont Carolinas in the tumultuous second half of the 19th century. She’s a daughter in a prominent Southern family, and finding a proper suitor was never going to be easy for her—her father and brother are unforgiving gatekeepers of her virtue, and her forceful manner often seems to intimidate men. After her first love, Burrington Alexander Nash, dies of yellow fever, Maitie throws herself into teaching literature. But at 24—“spinster” age for a woman in 1877—she meets John Deloach, a talented and handsome carpenter, and she’s immediately taken with him. However, Maitie’s father, Rollins, is vehemently opposed to her coupling with a “no ’count from the Low Country that we know nothing about.” He’s incensed when he discovers that John lied about his military service during the Civil War; when John was only 14 years old, he deserted the Confederate Army. Overall, debut author Grant paints a powerfully evocative picture of the South during the War Between the States and the Reconstruction period that followed it, and he deftly limns the social hierarchies at the heart of the area’s culture. He chronicles the ramifications of Maitie’s defiance of her father from her perspective as well from Laodicea “Deecee” Alston’s, who was once Maitie’s slave and remained her servant and companion. The story is related by a narrator who’s only identified by Deecee as “Mistah G”; he’s married to a relative of Maitie’s, and he becomes the latter’s confidant at the end of her life, the “Shahryar to her Scheherazade.” The plot that he reveals is simply riveting; Maitie’s version of what happened to John is remarkable, and Deecee’s is even more so, painting a picture that’s simultaneously heartbreaking and endearing. The narrator, too, plays an intriguing central role as the “the guardian of a story too terrible to consign to the lighthearted arena of family anecdote.”
An unforgettable story that hauntingly captures the American South during its most turbulent era.Pub Date: June 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78465-223-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Vanguard Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2019
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
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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