A thoroughly fresh historical novel that both captures the essence of its time and echoes challenges that still exist today.
Handler's fierce, sensually vivid debut novel takes off from the life of a little-known but fascinating figure from 19th-century American history.
Lulu Hurst was a gawky 14-year-old from a small town in Georgia when she entered the public eye. Beginning in 1883, she toured on the vaudeville circuit for two years, demonstrating magical powers allegedly acquired from magnetic forces that entered her body during an electrical storm. Giggling sweetly, she would cause men much larger than herself to be catapulted across a room or levitated from the chairs in which they were firmly seated. Working from a self-debunking autobiography Lulu published decades later, memoirist Handler (Braving the Fire, 2013, etc.) veers from history to create a satisfying work of fiction featuring a damaged younger brother, an ambitious father with a taste for gambling, and a dead grandmother with a surprising connection to the young magician. Lulu, who narrates most of the novel, is a compelling character, simultaneously intense and insecure. She knows that the act she and her skeptical father work out is designed to take advantage of the “marks” in the audience, but she also feels she has a real ability to “captivate” and “mesmerize” those she chooses to control, and she hopes she will gain the ability to heal her brother. Supersensitive, she pricks her skin with a needle to bring her giddy emotions under control, hears the thoughts of others, and feels a hangnail “shrill like a bugle from a fat man driving a cart.” As vivid as Lulu is the theatrical environment where she engages in “the subtle work of humbugging the city's finest” and is dazzled daily by an aerialist with trained cats or a juggler wearing “revealing tights.” Using this unique situation, Handler captures the ambivalence of female adolescence, where the newfound ability to captivate others exists in unsteady balance with the fear of loss of independence.
A thoroughly fresh historical novel that both captures the essence of its time and echoes challenges that still exist today.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-938235-48-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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