Another tale of community and transition from a writer to watch.
The author returns to Cataloochee (2007).
In his debut, Caldwell traced the history of a homesteading community in the Appalachians from the 1830s to the 1930s, when the U.S. government bought—or, depending on how you look at it, seized—this land to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Now, Caldwell picks up his tale more or less where he left off, following the disparate paths of residents who leave, those who stay and the newcomers drawn by the park. Oliver Babcock Jr., the dandyish lawyer who emerged as an unlikely hero in the first novel, returns on behalf of the Parks Commission, trying to convince people who have grown to trust him to sell their property. Similarly, Cataloochee native Jim Hawkins attempts to ease his one-time neighbors into a new life of federal restrictions as the park’s warden. Then there’s Silas Wright, a farmer who stubbornly decides to neither sell out nor leave. There’s drama here—from domestic strife in the Hawkins household to arson—but this story is not quite as compelling as Cataloochee, and Caldwell occasionally succumbs to some of the temptations he avoided in his first outing. There are, for example, several speeches, monologues that strain the reader’s credulity and exude a rather clunky sentimentality. Southerners, dirt farmers, individuals who favor mules to motorcars: Characters such as these have been so thoroughly romanticized and caricatured that it’s almost impossible to render them as real people, and doing just that was one of Caldwell’s greatest achievements in Cataloochee. That novel was also graced by a sort of organic wholeness that was a perfect match for its subject, and Caldwell does not accomplish that again. Nevertheless, to say that this novel is not quite as good as its predecessor is hardly an insult.
Another tale of community and transition from a writer to watch.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6344-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
PROFILES
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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