Overwritten, lugubrious and self-consciously oblique.
Kimmel (The Used World, 2007, etc.) tells the story of an unbalanced Indiana college girl who may have been abused in childhood.
The novel’s first sentence, “I never had sex with my father but I would have, if he had agreed,” sets the tone. Trace Pennington, who goes to college under the name Ianthe Covington, drops a seminar on “the wounded woman.” It’s a good label for the burgeoning genre of novels like Kimmel’s about brilliant, beautiful, abused females. Trace is certainly the classic “wounded woman” heroine: She’s poor; she’s goth lovely with striking eyes; she keeps a dream journal; she lives in an abandoned farmhouse; and she’s first in her class. Oh, and she may be insane. Trace shares her sordid past in bits and pieces along with large helpings of psychological theorizing heavy on Freud, Jung and James Hillman but also ranging from Greek mythology to Carl Sagan. Occasionally Trace sneaks back to her hometown to visit her friend Candy, who lives in a broken-down trailer with her kids. Candy confides she’s been visited by aliens—the same way Trace may have been as a child; one night she was found wandering outside in the woods by her house. Trace sometimes explains her wandering as the aftermath of an encounter with aliens. She also claims to have been tortured by members of her mother’s church as part of an exorcism ceremony. The youngest of three children, Trace clearly considers her mother cruel and abusive, her father a broken saint. In her final year in college, Trace becomes passionately involved with Jacob, a psychology professor who marries her and molds her into a proper faculty wife. Although Trace isn’t sure whether Jacob, whose first wife disappeared, is a Pygmalion or a Bluebeard in her life, readers will suspect that he is just a pretentious jerk. After a stay in the hospital Trace begins to put the jigsaw pieces of her past into some kind of order. Or not.
Overwritten, lugubrious and self-consciously oblique.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7284-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
