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
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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