Chevalier’s grasp of history and nuanced detail is quite fine, but all of the blood and tears of the time are made polite...
Chevalier’s latest historical fiction, the first set in her native America, circa 1850, is a tepid portrait of an English Quaker thrown into the tumult of Ohio’s Underground Railroad.
After the embarrassment of a broken engagement, Honor Bright decides to accompany her sister to America. Adventurous Grace is to marry fellow Quaker Adam Cox, an acquaintance from their hometown of Bridport, England. On the crossing, Honor suffers from doubt and seasickness, and tragedy befalls Grace. Making her way alone to Adam Cox, Honor stays with Belle Mills, a rough, independent woman who takes pity on Honor. In Belle’s millenary shop, Honor recovers from her journey, is introduced to Belle’s brother Donovan, a slave hunter she feels an inexplicable connection to, and sees what she believes is Belle’s covert involvement in the Underground Railroad. It is acknowledged by all that Honor must find a husband, and soon enough she does, a quiet dairy farmer. Used to English town life, Honor finds that an American farm (and her disapproving mother-in-law) requires some getting used to. When she sees runaway slaves hiding on the farm, she helps in meager ways but soon learns to send them to Mrs. Reed, a freed slave in neighboring Oberlin, a city filled with former slaves and Quakers. When her new family learns of Honor’s involvement, they are furious and insist she stop. In 1850 England and America, Friends (another name for Quakers) are opposed to slavery, but in America, ideals are often compromised when the risk—imprisonment and bankruptcy—is so great. Already emotionally estranged from her new family, Honor isn’t sure where her loyalties lie: to her husband’s family, her Quaker ideals or the ways of her happy English upbringing.
Chevalier’s grasp of history and nuanced detail is quite fine, but all of the blood and tears of the time are made polite and palatable, making quiet Honor’s story a bit too quiet.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-525-95299-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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 deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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