Beautifully written and intricately plotted, Porter’s novel falters only when she seems to step back from her characters, to...
A sprawling, ambitious debut novel traces the fates of a handful of characters, each one caught up in the lives of the others.
Eddie, a black Navy man, steals a copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead from an officer during the Vietnam War. For the rest of his life, he carries it with him, reciting lines. His youngest daughter, Claudia, grows up to be a Shakespeare scholar. She marries Rufus, the white son of a philanderer, who finds out, as an adult, that he has a half brother named Hank who grew up in Buckner County, Georgia. Agnes is black and came from Buckner County, too, but left after a traumatic incident on a dark road involving two white policemen and her boyfriend. Agnes marries Eddie, the Navy man, and moves to New York. Porter’s fantastic debut novel is a whirl of characters spidering outward through time and space. The novel tracks a half dozen of them, all connected to each other, more or less, in one way or another, from the 1950s through 2010. Agnes and the thing that happened to her one night on Damascus Road form the dark heart of the book. Everything else seems to radiate, at least tangentially, from that. When she was a girl, Agnes’ parents took in an almost-orphan, Eloise, with whom Agnes grows up, sharing a bedroom and, eventually, a bed. Agnes is Eloise’s one true love, but Agnes eventually refuses to see Eloise, and they grow distant. But this is just one of Porter’s storylines. There are several, and while they are each gripping and vivid in their own ways, so much action crowds the book. There isn’t enough space to get to know the characters; put another way, there’s a distancing between the narrator and the characters—Agnes in particular—as though they are being held at arm’s length. We see them from the outside, not the inside, even when they are narrating their own stories.
Beautifully written and intricately plotted, Porter’s novel falters only when she seems to step back from her characters, to stand at the edge of the water instead of jumping in.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57619-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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