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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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