by Alma Katsu ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2011
Beneath the trappings of undead lore is a love story that’s deeply old-fashioned, and not just because the principals were...
A backwoods Maine doctor falls under the spell of a confessed killer whose loves and sorrows go back two centuries.
When Dr. Luke Findley undresses Lanore McIlvrae, the murder suspect the St. Andrew sheriff has brought into Aroostook County Hospital, he discovers that although her clothes are saturated in blood, her body is unwounded; every drop came from the man she admits she slashed to death. Even so, Lanny tells Luke that the murder was anything but murder and begs him to help her escape. After he’s treated to an unnerving demonstration of her claim that she’s not just an ordinary killer, he agrees. During their headlong flight to Canada and freedom, she fills in her back story for him, and what a back story it is. Lanny’s troubles began at age 12, when she first spotted beautiful Jonathan St. Andrew, the son of the town’s wealthy founder, at church back in 1809. Although Jonathan was happy to acknowledge her love, he never exactly returned it, and her tempestuous tale takes her from romantic disappointments, crises and encounters with evil to a genre-crossing exile in Boston, where she’s taken in by the Mephistophelean savior who’ll become her fate: Count Adair cel Rau, whose own lengthy back story, which stretches back to 1349, is even more eventful than hers. Adair and his unholy retinue don’t suck anyone’s blood, but the gift of eternal life he offers in return for the souls of his lovers and followers will sound awfully familiar to vampire lovers everywhere. Debut novelist Katsu adds heavy foreshadowing, insistent underlining and a suffocating earnestness to this familiar story of the bonds that never die.
Beneath the trappings of undead lore is a love story that’s deeply old-fashioned, and not just because the principals were born 200 years ago.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9705-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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by Colson Whitehead ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2019
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
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The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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