Undeniably entertaining but as slow-moving as a steamy Macedonian summer.
The co-author of a novel about the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands now turns her attention to scandals besetting a small Depression-era West Virginia town.
Barrows, who co-wrote the surprise bestseller The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008), takes a similarly panoramic approach to the insular hamlet of Macedonia, West Virginia, using multiple points of view with epistolary interludes. It’s 1938, and the owner of Macedonia’s primary employer, the American Everlasting sock factory, has just laid off 44 workers over the objection of Sol McKubin, longtime plant manager. This would never have happened had the Romeyns, once Macedonia’s most prominent family, not lost control of Everlasting after the original factory was destroyed by arson in 1920. The novel’s main source of suspense is the mystery surrounding that disaster. Vause Hamilton was alleged to have set the fire, killing himself and wrecking the future of his best friend, Felix Romeyn. Presumably the motive was theft: the safe was robbed and some of the money disappeared. Sol claimed Felix and Vause were in cahoots, but Sol’s motives are suspect: not only was he envious of the two golden boys, Vause and Felix, but he loved Felix’s sister, Jottie, who had eyes only for Vause. Now Jottie, who has never married, is raising Felix’s young daughters, Willa and Bird, the products of a short-lived marriage, while feckless but charming Felix disappears for long stretches. Willa, a whip-smart tomboy in the Scout Finch mold, is alarmed at her father’s flirtation with Layla, a Washington, D.C., debutante who is boarding at Jottie’s house and writing a history of Macedonia for the WPA Writers’ Project. The novel is too long: an initial section of exposition regarding Layla, a relatively superfluous character, could have been streamlined, and italicized flashbacks abound. The ironic contrast between Macedonia’s official and actual history is played to the hilt, and this unique corner of Americana—a mélange of Yankee and Southern cultures—is re-created as vividly as the very different Anglo-European milieu of Guernsey.
Undeniably entertaining but as slow-moving as a steamy Macedonian summer.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-34294-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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