A spiritually infused homage to Australia’s diverse heritage hampered by an episodic structure.
This sequel continues the saga of the daughter of an Irish miner and an Aborigine woman in Australia.
It is 2015 and 12-year-old Lisa Maree is enjoying frolicking through the acreage of her grandparents’ Hillrock property outside the small city of Gympie in Queensland, accompanied by their border collie, Max. Hugging him, she feels Max shiver just before she hears a mournful wail: “Heartbreakingly intense, it rose and fell on the wind. It was a cry of human grief, but there was also longing and a drawn-out sigh—almost like a question.” Returning to the house, Lisa displays a pure white stone she found just before hearing the wail. Her grandmother Grace Daniels explains it is a Limga, “the Aboriginal word for any solid rock which had eternal properties.” It is on this mystical note that Roots (Marranga-Limga, 2015, etc.) sets her protagonists on a search into their long-forgotten family lineage, finally reaching back to the 1869 birth of Nika O’Reilly on the banks of the Mary River. Lisa’s Hillrock experience coincidently dovetails with the beginning of two research projects being undertaken by other 21st-century descendants of Nika and her husband, Tom Barritt—one inspired by the new grade-school teacher in Gympie interested in learning the history of the area, and the other involving an international effort to identify recently uncovered remains of World War I soldiers lost in France and Turkey. The relatively short novel has so many characters that it is difficult to keep track of them all. Fortunately, Roots provides a genealogical chart at the beginning, useful when readers become confused. The story also plays havoc with the timeline, jumping back to World War II before briefly returning to the present, and then back again to the 1940s. There’s a quick visit to the 1960s, and then a lengthy foray into the late 19th and early 20th century. It is here that the author successfully creates her most fully developed character, Nika. It is also the section richest in intriguing Gympie history and lore.
A spiritually infused homage to Australia’s diverse heritage hampered by an episodic structure.Pub Date: June 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-0071-7
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
