An enjoyable romance brings Black history into the present.
A Black couple’s romance ties together the past and the present in Hill’s novel.
The author interweaves a present-day storyline—photographer Alessandra Fleming leaves Manhattan for her hometown of Sag Harbor, New York, after her widowed and estranged father is hospitalized—with a series of first-person narratives that relate the story of Ayah, a woman kidnapped and enslaved in the 19th century. When she returns to Sag Harbor, Alessandra meets her neighbor’s grandson Zach Renard, an ethnographer studying the history of free Black communities on Long Island. The two feel an instant connection that intensifies as Zach supports Alessandra through her father’s final days. She is determined to understand the family secrets her parents kept from her as well as the increasing number of unnerving experiences she has been having, sensing sights, sounds, and smells that are not there. When Alessandra discovers a chest full of newspaper clippings, photos, and other artifacts, Zach brings his research skills to bear, and together they uncover Alessandra’s family history and its place in the Black diaspora. The emotionally satisfying love story is complemented by the book’s solid historical grounding as well as a cast of well-developed supporting characters—Zach’s grandmother Grace Oweku; Alessandra’s elderly neighbor Edith Samuels; and her longtime best friend, Traci Howard—who come with backstories that could fill a separate novel. The writing and pacing are solid, making it easy to get hooked by the story. The book’s supernatural elements (“When she opened the door to her space, a sudden flash of seeing herself stepping into a dim, lantern-lit room that smelled of damp wood, sea moss, and dirt floors leaped in front of her. The surreal moment seized her breath. She gripped the doorframe, shook her head, and the image scattered like startled birds”) echo those in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred while allowing Alessandra’s story to remain entirely its own. The narrative explores issues of systemic racism, slavery, generational wealth-building, and chosen families, addressing them organically without overwhelming the reader with heavy-handed messages. Distinguished by its intense and passionate love story and its insistence on the contemporary relevance of historical events, this engaging tale will keep the reader turning pages until the end.
An enjoyable romance brings Black history into the present.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781649371454
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sideways Books
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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