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THE WOODEN KING

McConnell fails to produce much feeling for his characters or their predicament.

A man struggles to survive in World War II Czechoslovakia.

There's not much distinctive about former university history professor Viktor Trn when the Nazis invade his Czechoslovakian homeland in March 1939. Living with his wife, Alena, 6-year-old son, Aleks, and father-in-law, Miroslav, he becomes a mostly passive witness to terrible events, save for a brief time when he spies on the movement of German troop trains for the resistance before abandoning that work because he's convinced the Nazis are about to be defeated. In successive chapters, one for each year of the war (with an epilogue in 1948), the novel follows Viktor and his family as daily life inexorably deteriorates under German rule until 1945, when the country becomes the scene of intense fighting between Hitler's forces and the advancing Russian army. Apart from a glimpse of public executions in 1940 and passing references to the removal of the country's Jewish population, including one of Aleks' friends, to the nearby Terezín concentration camp, there's little real drama until the final 60 pages of the book, when Viktor flees a German forced labor crew and makes his way across the devastated countryside, seeking to reunite with his family. McConnell (A Picture Book of Hell and Other Landscapes, 2005) relies extensively on dialogue, but whether it's a conversation between Viktor and Aleks on a walk home from school or a conversation among a group of conscript laborers, much of it doesn't rise above the level of the mundane, failing either to advance the plot significantly or reveal much about the characters' inner lives. The novel also suffers from a fatal flaw: its unappealing protagonist. Other than a close relationship with his son and a couple of fitful affairs, Viktor is a man less actor than acted upon, making it hard to generate sympathy for his plight. As a result, the plot developments in the novel's concluding pages that might be moving in another work don't earn the emotional resonance the author clearly seeks here.

McConnell fails to produce much feeling for his characters or their predicament.

Pub Date: May 1, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-938235-37-5

Page Count: 328

Publisher: Hub City Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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THE NICKEL BOYS

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...

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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

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