In Wakefield's (Lot's Life, not reviewed) novel, which manages the feat of being both sweet and wily, three narrators reminisce about Kay Roper, a schoolteacher who arrived in the quiet British village of Padmore to teach in a girls' secondary school in 1942, and who has been killed unceremoniously by a swerving postal van. Janet Haycock, an adoring former student, recalls how Roper handled her charges with respect. She instilled a sense of pride in them, and insisted on shaking each one's hand individually and giving a formal and personal good-bye at the end of the day. Patrick Harper, a miner and Roper's neighbor, remembers how he trailed around after her on lovesick jaunts. He also recalls how Roper ministered to him when he was in the hospital after he almost lost an arm in a mining accident. Mrs. Chaplin, once the headmistress of the school and now living in a nursing home, reminisces about Roper's defense of her heavy use of makeup and flashy clothing, as well as the day that she produced a jar of salve that soothed the bad case of crabs that the snooty Mrs. Pickett appeared to have caught from her husband when he returned from the front. Pickett threw off her knickers right there in the headmistress's office and allowed Roper to apply it. Being forthright about sex and sexuality was Roper's strong suit. She organized an after-school group with mothers and used the time to instruct them on how to find mutual satisfaction with their husbands, and she kept a chart in her classroom of each student's menstrual period. These facts matched up oddly with her personal life, since she seemed dedicated only to her father and never dated. There is a great deal of gentle humor here, and Roper's death ultimately reveals several surprises. A delightful picture of village life, and then some.
Pub Date: July 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11094-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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