Well-intentioned, but heavy-handed.
In White’s sixth novel (The Garden of Martyrs, 2004, etc.), a man captures a runaway slave and discovers moral qualms he’s been repressing for years.
Tracking people is Augustus Cain’s only marketable skill, but he isn’t eager to practice it anymore. The patriotic Southerner isn’t against slavery, but he dislikes the superior attitude of the wealthy plantation owners who hire him and the dangers of extracting black fugitives from the increasingly abolitionist North. Faced with a huge gambling debt and the threatened loss of his beloved horse, however, Cain reluctantly agrees to retrieve runaway Rosetta for her master, a tobacco planter named Eberly whose extreme insistence suggests “a more personal reason for wanting her back.” Judging Cain not too reliable, Eberly saddles him with three companions: the white-trash Strofe brothers and the psychopathic Preacher, who tries to rape Rosetta almost as soon as she’s caught. Like most of the other heavily foreshadowed events here, the resulting confrontation between Cain and Preacher occurs primarily to provide an impetus for Cain to acknowledge the horrors of slavery and his feelings for the proud, abused Rosetta, which make it impossible for him to return her to Eberly. Despite lots of backstory about his service in the Mexican War and love for a peasant girl who was killed for sleeping with a gringo, Cain isn’t an interesting enough character for his moral awakening to be terribly compelling. Rosetta too is sketched in very broad strokes, and Eberly is a cartoon villain. The author has nothing new to say about slavery or the mixed motives of those who supported it, though that doesn’t prevent White from indulging in long passages that explain Cain’s shifting perspective rather than dramatizing it. It’s all as obvious as the protagonist’s surname. An epilogue that shows Cain on the eve of the battle of Antietam is almost offensive, suggesting that loving Rosetta changed nothing essential about him.
Well-intentioned, but heavy-handed.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-134072-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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