Flawed but impressively ambitious and keening with emotion.
Her son’s lynching during a 1910 streetcar strike takes a Philadelphia woman on a painful journey through her enslaved past.
As she sits by the hospital bedside of her dying son, Edward, Spring talks with the ghost of her sister Tempe, his birth mother. “I’m taking him home,” Tempe says, and she wants Spring to “lead him home” by telling Edward his family’s story. With the help of a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and personal testimonies she has collected, Spring begins with the story of Ella, a free woman kidnapped from Philadelphia in 1843 to lift the “curse” that keeps enslaved women on the Walker plantation barren. On the plantation, Ella develops an intimate, fraught relationship with Agnes, whose mother has been preventing pregnancies rather than see more children born enslaved. Nonetheless, Ella and Agnes both get pregnant; stymied in an attempt to escape, Ella drowns herself on the morning Spring and Tempe are born. The power of these scenes is muffled by several murky plot developments that flag a debut author’s imperfect control of her material. Battle-Felton emulates Beloved by mingling a stark depiction of slavery’s cruelty with a folkloric portrait of African American culture, then adding an angry ghost, but she lacks Toni Morrison’s mastery of the complex narrative. However, the novel comes to a strong finish after an apocalyptic denouement on the Walker plantation at the end of the Civil War. Spring heads North with Tempe’s infant and is inspired to begin her scrapbook by fellow refugees’ stories of loved ones lost in the postwar chaos. In Philadelphia, she bitterly confront the limits of African American freedom in post-bellum society, limits also underscored in interpolated scenes showing how Edward got entangled in the strike. A lyrical vision of family reunion brings the novel to a moving conclusion.
Flawed but impressively ambitious and keening with emotion.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9826-2712-6
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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