An impressively written tale that’s layered with intrigue.
In Hornbuckle’s (The Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter, 2010, etc.) latest novel, two brothers become inexplicably fused together.
Fifteen-year-old Robert and 13-year-old Wally Mackintosh are brothers who live on their parents’ farm in Alabama near the Mississippi line. One afternoon in early June 1959, the two boys head to a pond, not far from the farmhouse, to cool off after a hot morning. Soon after diving into the pool, the two boys smell an unusual, sulfurous odor, then hear a whistling sound coming from above. Wally clutches Robert in fear, and Robert swims frantically to the pool’s edge with his brother on his back. A fireball falls out of the sky and splashes down in the opposite end of the pond. The water heats up “faster than when a kettle is poured into the bath,” and the boys, after dragging themselves out, discover that they have become physically connected: “Wally’s left hand, forearm, and shoulder were stuck to Robert in an embrace from behind.” An examination by Dr. Stanhope, the local physician, suggests that they won’t be able to be separated easily, and this is confirmed at the hospital after X-rays show that the fusion is “more than just skin deep” and features abnormalities that doctors can’t explain. Military personnel arrive and begin conducting tests, and newspaper reporter Munford Coldwater takes a personal interest in the family. Meanwhile, the boys must come to terms with their new lives while searching for a way to break free. Near the opening of this novel, Hornbuckle embeds the story in a specific time in American history, referring to 1959’s Communist paranoia, Elvis-mania, and the progress of the civil rights movement in a laconic line: “it had been a summer of reds and a summer of blues and a summer of blacks.” This phrase also subtly and powerfully hints at the opposing forces that shape the novel’s overarching narrative—a fear of otherness and a love of music. Unable to engage in farm work, Wally, a keen fiddle player, teaches his nonmusical brother to play, and the family takes to the road as mendicant musicians. Hornbuckle’s description of the learning process is both tender and unsettling: “[Robert] could feel the hand on his chest, Wally’s fingering hand, itching to form into the correct positions, unable to curve…he could even sense which finger Wally wanted to use on the fingerboard, and this helped him sometimes find the spot.” Indeed, he’s an alarmingly talented writer who’s able to vividly communicate the wide spectrum of sensations and emotions—from intimacy to awkwardness to sheer frustration—that spring from the boys’ situation. He also seemingly effortlessly captures the atmosphere, pace, and cuisine of the American South and shows an acute understanding of the political mood, resulting in an engrossing novel. Readers who prefer stories that tie up every loose end in the denouement will be left wanting more—but otherwise, they’ll find this one to be a rare and peculiar gem.
An impressively written tale that’s layered with intrigue.Pub Date: April 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60489-228-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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