A masterful first novel—the sort of book that warms even as it devastates, that forces serious reflection and yet charms.
In the early 19th century, a man quests into the American West and finds a world teetering between extinction and dreams.
A decade or so after the Lewis and Clark expedition, John Cyrus Bellman, a widower and mule breeder, reads in the newspaper of the discovery of “monstrous bones…sunk in the salty Kentucky mud” and is convinced that “the same gigantic monsters still [walk] the earth in the unexplored territories of the west.” Promising to write frequently, Bellman leaves his preteen daughter, Bess, on his Pennsylvania farm and heads west. What follows is the story of Bess’ waiting and Bellman’s wandering; the story of the letters Bellman sends and their unlucky eastward journeys; the story of Bellman’s guide, “an ill-favored, narrow-shouldered Shawnee boy who bore the unpromising name of Old Woman From A Distance” and whose tribe—after being harassed by settlers and paid off in trinkets—has recently undertaken its own less-voluntary western migration. Bess dreams of her father’s return while struggling to evade the predatory attentions of two local men. Bellman, a soft-spoken Ahab, suffers winters “harder than he’d thought possible” yet remains enthralled by “the notion that…there were always things…you hadn’t dreamed of.” Old Woman From A Distance is at once “angry about the past, but ambitious for the future” and must eventually decide whether to undertake a quest of his own. Welsh author Davies’ (The Redemption of Galen Pike, 2017, etc.) slim, complex, and achingly beautiful first novel is a sculpture of daring shifts and provocative symmetries welded together by lyrical, fast-paced prose. Davies dispenses with troublesome thousand-mile wildernesses in a sentence and dashes between the minds of both principal and ancillary characters. The result is a choral performance, reminiscent of those by Penelope Fitzgerald: The reader enjoys a story far greater in its sweep and better-linked in its causes than any of that story’s participants can appreciate. Deployed on the stage of the midlapsarian American frontier, Davies’ chorus manages to weave threads of myth and hope into the gnarly chords of historical tragedy.
A masterful first novel—the sort of book that warms even as it devastates, that forces serious reflection and yet charms.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7934-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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