An empathetic and sobering look at the price women of the 1950s sometimes paid for desire.
Two ambitious young Black women struggle with the consequences of unplanned pregnancies in post–World War II America.
Ruby Pearsall, one of the two main characters of this historical novel, wants to become a doctor. She’s only 14, but she’s already set herself on the path to her dream as a student in a demanding special program that she hopes will earn her a college scholarship. Her mother is indifferent, her father absent, but Ruby has her own determination and the warm support of her Aunt Marie, a nightclub performer who takes the girl in when her mother kicks her out. Distraction strikes, though, in the person of Shimmy, the son of Aunt Marie’s Jewish landlord, who falls madly in love with Ruby despite her efforts to remind him of the perils of interracial romance in Philadelphia in 1949. Eleanor Quarles, the book’s other main character, is a few years older than Ruby. She’s already in college, at Howard University in Washington, and happily starting to pursue a career as an archivist in the school’s library. It’s there that she meets William Pride Jr., a handsome, charming medical student whose attention to her seems almost like a dream—until she meets his family. They’re part of the city’s wealthy, accomplished Black elite, and Eleanor, who’s from a blue-collar family in small-town Ohio, feels out of her element. What’s more, unlike Eleanor, almost everyone in William’s social orbit is light-skinned enough to pass for White. William’s ferociously snobbish mother, Rose, does not see Eleanor as a potential bride for her son, but William is in love. Both young women get pregnant. For Eleanor, that leads to marriage but not happiness; for Ruby, it leads to a stint in a nightmarish maternity home for unwed mothers. The events that will create a bond between the two are telegraphed a little too early, and the plot sometimes bogs down. But the engaging main characters and wealth of historical detail carry the novel forward.
An empathetic and sobering look at the price women of the 1950s sometimes paid for desire.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9736-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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