An ambitious work sabotaged by a confusing plot and awkwardly turbid prose.
In this historical novel set in the South Sudan, a man looks for the young sister he lost during the confusion of the country’s civil war, assisted by a battery of pilots and humanitarian workers.
While her village was being brutally pillaged by soldiers, 3-year-old Nyasala was separated from her family. Fortunately spared from violence, she’s been taken under the care of neighbor Mayen, who does his best to navigate her to safety across lands torn asunder by conflict. He’s a remarkably reliable guide for his age—he’s 18—unsurprising, since he’s worked as a spy for the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Much later, Nyasala—now 10 years old—has been adopted by a Murle family; she’s of Nuer extraction, and the Nuers and Murles have long been locked in conflict over cattle, the “most profitable commodity.” Nyasala’s brother, Akol—who was separated from her when soldiers overran their village—learns that she may be living in Pibor, an area so dangerous its humanitarian staff is being evacuated. Debut author Jackson describes a collaborative effort to find her, detailing the roles of medical professionals, pilots, security officials, and nongovernmental organization operatives, as well as the enmeshed presence of “Mama UN.” It is impossible to identify, beyond Nyasala, a protagonist, a refreshingly uncommon literary strategy: First published in Spanish and translated by Katz, the entire novel reveals layer upon layer of bureaucratic entanglement and collegial cooperation among the many agencies, public and private, attempting to save the war-torn country from itself. However, the plot is crammed with too many intersecting narrative lines, and because of the general sloppiness of the writing—or perhaps of the translation—it is nearly impossible to keep them neatly distinct. The author seems to introduce a new character with each page, failing to give enough attention to any one of them to achieve proper development. Jackson is at his best portraying the grim litany of “persecution, rape, and street violence” in South Sudan’s capital city of Juba. However, his prose ranges from haltingly ungrammatical to simply unintelligible, as in sentences like this one: “It was their pride to maintain and controlling the area since their salary’s rarely paid which was another reason to erupt the current conflict in this young nation.”
An ambitious work sabotaged by a confusing plot and awkwardly turbid prose.Pub Date: June 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-7654-1
Page Count: 198
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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