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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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