An engrossing tale of romantic and familial love set against the exciting radicalism of the ’40s and ’50s music, drug, and...
A social novel tells the story of a nightclub singer and a troubled jazz musician dealing with the turmoil of the mid-20th century.
Chicago, 1935. Things improve for young Pearl Sayles and her family once her abusive father leaves the house. Pearl finally gets to attend school, where a kindly teacher helps her to learn to read and to take pride in her black features. Tragedy strikes when her father reappears and kidnaps her younger brother, Ronnie. Two years later, black jazz musician Demetrius “Doc” Calhoun and his friend Jimmy Turner sneak into Spain to join the International Brigades—despite Doc’s never considering himself a “joiner.” After Jimmy is killed, Doc learns the horrible cost of combat, though he still signs up to fight the Nazis a few years later during World War II. After the war, a reunited Pearl and Ronnie leave their painful history in Chicago to start over in New York, where the Harlem jazz scene is flourishing. Pearl finds a job singing in a nightclub, while Ronnie—a former sex worker—is exposed to the city’s blossoming gay culture. Pearl curiously notices the heroin habit of one of the other musicians: “He was never unpleasant, but on the nights he seemed especially happy onstage, she always smiled, glad that he had found something in that needle to chase away his blues.” When Ronnie falls back to his old ways of making money, he disappears, and Pearl turns to the drug to dull her pain. Soon she meets Doc, who has returned from the war with his own demons to find his place back in New York’s music scene. As heroin, the Red Scare, and the civil rights movement begin to reshape the world around them, Pearl, Doc, and Ronnie will have to pull together in order to survive the 20th century. Smith’s (Mello Yello, 2015, etc.) writing is accessible and deeply in tune with the emotional state of her characters. Her prose is matter-of-fact and laden with poignant details that unlock the darkness that haunts the story: “As she ran the soothing cold water over her ring finger, she jiggled her right bicuspid with her tongue. She had lost one of her back teeth a few months earlier, and now this one was so loose she was afraid it would fall out at supper. There was no money for a dentist, but she didn’t care. Not today.” Pearl is the center of the novel and its most realized character. The author has found a way to make the ups and downs of the mid-20th century feel like an inevitable outgrowth of Pearl’s personal life rather than historical events upon which she has been indelicately grafted. Doc’s storyline feels a bit more contrived, particularly the conversations he has during the war years, which frame the book’s notions of right and wrong in an unnecessarily overt way. Even so, Smith has woven a compelling, character-driven narrative in which readers should quickly become emotionally invested.
An engrossing tale of romantic and familial love set against the exciting radicalism of the ’40s and ’50s music, drug, and political cultures.Pub Date: April 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9904996-7-1
Page Count: 405
Publisher: Sonata Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
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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