A captivating body of stories spanning much of American history.
Johnson’s collection of short stories centers around Black voices and experiences.
While much recent literature has sought to prioritize diversity, highlighting more Black voices in the American story, the “Black experience” is often relegated to specific segments of history and culture. In his collection of short stories, Johnson addresses this unfortunate tendency, exploring the Black experience against the backdrop of over a century of American life, starting with the Reconstruction and leading all the way up to the turn of the 21st century. His stories capture a multitude of communities and individual perspectives, from largely Black church communities (as in “Vicarage” and “The Wages of Sin”) and segregated schools (featured in “Waddellee” and “Angeline Smith Was Retiring”) to the star-crossed love of a would-be interracial couple in 1960s Vermont (“Summer’s End”) and the misadventures of interracial friends (“The Doughnuts”) to worlds in which race is indeterminate. Each piece captures human vicissitudes in a uniquely microcosmic way. The narratives are fluid, traversing time and space; however, they are all uniquely American, encouraging readers to think about the essential themes of American literature in the context of racially marginalized groups. Each character is larger than life and very much a product of their environment while maintaining universal appeal (“Unlike the church ladies, Cora and Martha gladly profiteered in illegal business: they played the numbers, and the 700 block of Sevier Street was the only block in their Alcohol Beverage Control town where two rival neighborhood bootleggers peacefully lived and practiced business next door to each other”). At times, the author plays with form, creating cinematic depth with italicized dialogue that elicits feelings of disconnection and memory or constructing cyclical plotlines that create a sense of everyday surrealism. The result is a collection of memorable stories that tackle questions of identity, faith, community, and injustice. A literary masterpiece from start to finish, this collection is a must-read.
A captivating body of stories spanning much of American history.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798891327559
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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