A thoughtful examination of the intertwining of race and culture—as well as a truly scary portrait of a genuine psychopath.
A fugitive slave pursued by a vicious bounty hunter provides the fictional framework for novelist and music writer Piazza (Devil Sent the Rain, 2011, etc.) to ponder the contradictions of blackface minstrelsy.
Fleeing the bitter knowledge that the man who owns him is his father, Joseph heads north to Philadelphia, acquiring the name Henry Sims en route. He’s a brilliant banjo player and extraordinary dancer, so when James Douglass sees him performing on the street, he knows Henry is the man to revive the flagging fortunes of his minstrelsy troupe, the Virginia Harmonists. It’s illegal for a Negro to appear onstage with white performers, but light-skinned Henry audaciously suggests he can hide his race by applying burnt cork as they do. James agrees; having escaped drudgery on a Pennsylvania farm to find paradoxical freedom in “blacking up,” he feels a surprising kinship with this proud, assertive artist who doesn’t bother to disguise his opinion that he’s as good as any white man. Passing off their new member as Mexican, the Virginia Harmonists gain renewed popularity. Unfortunately, their reputation as “the best nigger show in town” attracts the attention of Tull Burton, dispatched by Joseph’s owner/father to recapture him. Several sickeningly brutal scenes have already made it clear that Tull is a dangerous sadist, and the tension is nearly unbearable as he stalks Henry. But Piazza’s elegantly written narrative also has time for James’ poetic musings on the masks all performers wear, as well as his uneasy feelings about finding joy in an act grounded in the culture of an enslaved people. The rest of the Harmonists are also fully fleshed characters, as is the troupe’s seamstress, Rose, whose final appearance quietly makes the point that women too are painfully confined in antebellum America. The closing pages offer no neat resolution for anyone, only haunting reminders of life’s uncertainties and complexities.
A thoughtful examination of the intertwining of race and culture—as well as a truly scary portrait of a genuine psychopath.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-228412-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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