A rich, engrossing tale about the antebellum South that delivers indelible characters.
Set on a plantation in antebellum Louisiana, this historical novel will remind readers of the long reach of Greek tragedy.
The story really begins when the Jenseys buy some enslaved people in 1843, including—as a companion for their daughter, Kate—a pretty, young biracial girl named Monette. The Jenseys own the Fox Creek plantation, upriver from New Orleans. They are William and Sarah, and their two children: Kate and her older brother, Breck. William is rightly proud of Fox Creek, which he took over after his father’s death. He and Sarah work hard and William treats enslaved people fairly by his lights, and better than most of his neighbors do. He disciplines them if he has no other choice, but he also rewards the group. Farming is often chancy, yet he is determined to eventually leave a prosperous Fox Creek to Breck. Then comes trouble, the depth of it hardly recognizable at the time. One of the newer enslaved workers, Sawney, insists on hoeing cotton by himself, not with a gang, the practice at Fox Creek. Of course, the real issue is insubordination. William tries, fruitlessly, to reason with the man. William ends up shooting a fleeing Sawney in the hip. Now, William has made an implacable enemy who will lurk on the edges of the story from then on. The climax of the tale is classically tragic—and aching with the irony that no Jensey had seen it coming, although attentive readers will, at least in broad outline.
While this is Torrey’s first novel for an adult audience, the author of 12 children’s books is experienced and it shows, especially in the compelling period details and the depth of these characters. Readers learn about daily life on a working plantation. Even though plantation life offers its diversions and rustic celebrations, William and Sarah don’t swan around drinking mint juleps all day. In addition, the neighbors’ talk of the looming conflict between the states just makes William uncomfortable. He is no firebrand. William is a man of his times, totally captured by the masculine myth. He loves his wife—she deserves it—and worries about Breck, who works hard to please Papa but is bookish and hardly looks forward to taking over the plantation. Kate comes closest to the Southern belle stereotype, but she is, after all, a typical romantic teenager. Monette has affected the siblings’ lives in sometimes-terrible ways. And where, exactly, is a biracial girl supposed to fit into the Southern social scheme of things? Underlying it all, of course, and driving the absorbing plot is that “peculiar institution,” slavery, and the Jenseys’ desperate attempts to normalize an enormity. The Jenseys do their part in maintaining that fiction and so do the enslaved. But then comes Sawney, the rebuke to it all, the embodiment of smoldering rage, the avenging warrior. In this riveting story, Torrey exhibits a keen writer’s instinct for the metaphorical. Here is William in a heated showdown with Breck: “But no sooner had relief soothed his battered spirit, it flitted away again like a bird undecided where to roost.” And in a lighter vein: “It wasn’t until September peeped its head around the corner of August.”
A rich, engrossing tale about the antebellum South that delivers indelible characters.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798991455527
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2025
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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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