A novel that reminds its readers that racism forges its own lasting, unbearable nightmares.
No matter how much you’ll want to look away from the callous injustice and horrific abuse depicted here, this period thriller’s investment of urgency and imagination keeps you riveted.
It's 1950 and the relatively sheltered life of Robert Stephens, a 12-year-old African American boy living in Florida, is changed forever when he comes to the aid of his older sister, Gloria, who is harassed by the teenage son of their town’s wealthiest white man. Though Robert does nothing more than kick Lyle McCormack, reprisals only begin with Lyle’s father brutally boxing Robert’s right ear. Robert is soon handcuffed, dragged away by police, and given a quick trial. He's sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, euphemistically known as “The Reformatory,” an institution known for racism and brutality toward its adolescent population. Thirty years before, a fire at the school killed 25 boys, many of whom were buried in a gravesite on the grounds along with the bodies of other inmates who died prematurely (and mysteriously). Somehow, Robert can communicate with these dead boys’ ghosts, and the institution’s creepy and corrupt Warden Haddock promises Robert early release if he will somehow help him put these “haints” in something called a “collection jar.” And yes, the spirits are out to get the warden, too. For revenge. But mostly, they want Robert to help set them free and let them be at peace. Meanwhile, Gloria is fiercely, doggedly determined to set Robert free, using whatever legal means are available to a young Black woman in the still-segregated South, including the NAACP. Like Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer–winning The Nickel Boys (2019), this novel is based on Florida’s infamous Dozier School for Boys. Due brings her own gifts in the supernatural-fantasy genre as well as elements of her own family history (the book is dedicated in part to her great-uncle, who died at Dozier in 1937) to this vividly realized page-turner, which is at once an ingenious ghost story, a white-knuckle adventure, and an illuminating if infuriating look back at a shameful period in American jurisprudence that, somehow, doesn’t seem so far away.
A novel that reminds its readers that racism forges its own lasting, unbearable nightmares.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781982188344
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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