In 1984, the late Burns (d. 1990) published Cold Sassy Tree—a spirited, southern small-town rural tale with robust characters and a regional period (1906) diction that was as tangy and real as grits. Now comes this partial sequel—which continues the story of Will Tweedy and the courting of his future wife—that Burns, with extraordinary courage, worked on through her final illness. Burns's editor, Katrina Kenison, who was left with notes and letters by the author to indicate plotlines beyond the 15 finished chapters here, has contributed a tribute and personal reminiscence. The previous novel concerned the adventures of narrator Will Tweedy, then 14, of Cold Sassy Tree, Georgia, who among others wondered at the shocking marriage of newly widowed Grandpa Blakeslee and the stylish Miss Love. Now, in 1917, Grandpa is gone, and boarding with Miss Love is that ``pure-T beauty,'' new schoolteacher Sanna Maria Klein, who's infatuated with a Harvard boy—until her disastrous visit to his fancy home when bath water floods a festive board. Will's courting moves on—even through a Thanksgiving when Sanna's usually genial foster-father, snookered on moonshine, saws a half moon out of the dining-room table to accommodate his massive stomach—but there are seeds of trouble even before the wedding: Will, a county agent for the state's Department of Agriculture, speaks of farming's gamble as ``excitin','' Sanna says, ``I hate excitement...just another word for worry.'' Meanwhile, most of the Cold Sassy Tree cast is here again: abrasive Aunt Loma, who can whistle ``Whispering Hope'' so thrillingly at church but who has crazy marriage plans, as well as a mean deal for her son; Will's parents, yoked but apart; and townsfolk who have the stubborn endurance of hardscrabble lives beyond their salty talk. For fans of Cold Sassy Tree, an essential; for newcomers, a spur to read the earlier novel. Kenison's tribute to Burns, a gentle, gallant woman, comprises half of the book. (Eight-page photo insert)
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1992
ISBN: 0-89919-908-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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