Very nicely done: Leff writes with an insider’s eye and a light, understated style perfectly suited to her subjects.
Debut about the interconnected lives of the residents and employees of a Park Avenue apartment house from the early 1970s to the turn of the new century.
Like most of those big limestone piles that sprang up over the New York Central tracks during the Roaring Twenties, 980 Park is a lot less sedate that it looks from the outside, inhabited as it is by a nervous agglomeration of rich strivers continually looking over their shoulders to see who’s gaining on them. Some, like the Jewish lawyer Richard Sapphire, are arrivistes who have to prove themselves at every step of the game; others, like the Countess d’Alencon are set within the social order as solidly as the North Star. The ones who suffer most seem to be the children (rebellious Sandra Payne has a child by her father’s Jamaican chauffeur) or the wives (bored Shelley Sapphire waits until her 50s to start a career in journalism)—but no one at all seems terribly happy. Some of the class strife is familiar: the building narrowly averts a discrimination suit by admitting more Jewish tenants in the 1980s, for example, and one of the doormen fired in the famous 1976 strike goes on to become a successful fashion designer with a major chip on his shoulder—but there are some interesting and unexpected twists. The granddaughter of a Nicaraguan dictator who begins her New York life as a Latin American Brooke Astor forsakes the parties and the benefits and ends up as a kind of Sandinistan Harriet Tubman, smuggling political prisoners into the States. The Jamaican grandson becomes his racist grandpa’s heir. And a middle-aged Social X-Ray, facing the imminent death of her elderly mother, is miraculously transformed into a human being.
Very nicely done: Leff writes with an insider’s eye and a light, understated style perfectly suited to her subjects.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33061-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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