A tale for readers intrigued by the intersecting lives of hard-luck cases.
Harris (A Bottle of Rain, 2007, etc.) delivers a literary novel about a number of ramshackle characters based in modern-day Florida
Stephanie, who recently shot her husband, is on a Greyhound bus to Florida. She strikes up a conversation with a man named Jeremiah, and it’s not long before she’s on her way to his trailer-park home in Daytona Beach. There, she meets Jeremiah’s friend, a physically misshapen, frequently excited man known as Charley Younger, and thinks the following to herself: “That boy had no chin and his ears were weird and his eyes were barely open. Retarded!” After she settles into a new life with her newfound companions, the cast of characters expands to include all sorts of sun-tanned, bottomed-out, chain-smoking, drinking, fishing, and often lonely people. All of them, for some reason or another, find themselves in an area where Ponce de Léon once searched for the fabled Fountain of Youth. Readers follow along as Stephanie, and those in similar straits, do their best to go about their lives no matter how tragic, flawed, or broken they are. For example, readers are told of one young woman, just down from New York City and staying in her boss’s time-share: “This would be a long dark decline that, regardless, would not end well. She just knew it.” The question becomes just what will happen to these people, stuck in this smoldering ashtray of America. In this bleak, entertaining novel, surprises are frequent; just when readers think that they know exactly what’s going to happen next, it turns out that they don’t. Changes come, not only in geography, but also in the characters’ redemptive qualities. Some of the individuals’ broad statements, however, are questionable, even cringe-worthy (such as an assertion that “Guilt drove everything. Drove you everywhere like an evil chauffeur”). However, the book’s descriptions, no matter how crude, prove more memorable; for instance, one woman is said to be an “erotic armadillo,” while another’s nipples poke through her tank top “like thorns.” If the whole setup appears crass, that’s because it is; the focus isn’t on yacht clubs and beachfront condominiums, but on more meager figures who, in spite of it all, manage to survive—or not.
A tale for readers intrigued by the intersecting lives of hard-luck cases.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60489-163-8
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2016
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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