The heroic, victimized Concepción feels engineered, but de Alba’s Puritans are as rich and complex as any characters in...
Widely disparate strands of New World history converge in this fiction from de Alba (Desert Blood, 2005, etc.) about a young Mexican woman who surmounts one cruelty after another only to find herself accused of witchcraft in 17th-century Boston.
Concepción is born in Mexico to a mixed-race mother and highborn Spanish father. After escaping the monastery where she’s learned fine penmanship as an indentured servant, Concepción is captured by pirates headed to New England. The pirate captain rapes her repeatedly before selling her as a slave to Boston merchant Nathaniel Greenwood, who renames her Thankful Seagraves. He wants Concepción to run his aging father-in-law Tobias’s chicken farm. Greenwood’s wife Rebecca quickly realizes Concepción is pregnant. Rebecca, who exhibits both selfishness and the capacity for love, successfully nurses Concepción through her difficult pregnancy because she wants Concepción’s child for herself. Concepción names her new baby Jerónima but Rebecca calls her Hanna and the name sticks. When Tobias, gruff but learned and not unkind, marries Concepción, she becomes a free woman. While her life grows relatively easy, she finds herself in a losing battle for her daughter’s affection. Hanna refuses to learn Spanish, is as hostile to Concepción’s Catholicism as any good little Puritan and calls Rebecca “Mama Becca” from an early age. Eventually Hanna chooses to live most of the week with Rebecca’s family. When the witch scare erupts, Concepción is accused and imprisoned. Tobias supports her, but Hanna gladly testifies against her. Although Concepción survives the witch trials until they peter out, Hanna has broken her heart. She knows she has no future in Boston. With money left her by the now-deceased Tobias, she boards a ship to the West Indies disguised as a man. Years later, Hanna reads the letters Concepción left behind and learns her history.
The heroic, victimized Concepción feels engineered, but de Alba’s Puritans are as rich and complex as any characters in recent historical fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36641-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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