by Jay Rubin ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2015
There is plenty of insight and illumination into cultural difference between the two countries, but these never coalesce...
A debut novel, from the longtime translator of Haruki Murakami's work, about culture clash between Americans and Japanese in the World War II era.
This novel arrives with an impressive pedigree; in addition to translating Murakami, Rubin (Making Sense of Japanese, 2002) is a scholar of Japanese literature who has taught at Harvard. So readers might be surprised at the heavy-handedness and lack of nuance in his fiction, which suffers from undeveloped characters, maudlin dialogue, and a contrived plot. Before Pearl Harbor, the widowed pastor of a Japanese congregation in Seattle becomes smitten with a newcomer to the church. “He felt his legs grow weak” at his first sight of Mitsuko. “She was stunning.” The pastor, who is white, has a young son, Billy, who will mature into the novel’s protagonist. Mitsuko lost a child and no longer has a husband, having left one who beat her in Japan. For the purposes of fiction, the coincidences are perfect. He lusts for her as much as a devout Christian can, while she, in turn, feels stirrings as well. “The Lord is tempting me now,” she tells him. “You are my temptation, Pastor Tom.” She and Billy form a bond much stronger than the one the boy has with his father as the marriage between the two meets resistance from both cultures. After Pearl Harbor, tensions estrange the pastor from his wife, who leaves with his son for an internment camp, rejecting the religion he represents. Billy eventually returns to his father, and much of the novel finds him following in his dad’s footsteps, studying to become a minister and a missionary, showing an affinity for Japanese women. The fate of Mitsuko is a mystery he must resolve as he follows his mission to Japan and has all sorts of revelations, some more probable than others.
There is plenty of insight and illumination into cultural difference between the two countries, but these never coalesce into a fully fleshed novel.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63405-950-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Chin Music Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Madeline Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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