A beguiling and luminous tale of loss and hope.
In Williams’ novel, a young girl’s personae shift as the tensions of a small town are revealed.
The story centers on the Appalachian town of Summerton and a 9-year-old girl named Henrietta Moon, who appears in starkly different guises in loosely interwoven plotlines. Readers first meet her as a fourth grader at Neil Armstrong Elementary School, where she dreams of becoming the first woman to land on the moon and designs a rocket booster to take her there. While volunteering at a retirement home, she bonds with 86-year-old Gerald Harris over their love of space flight. A second storyline probes Summerton’s darker side through the perspective of Henry, a writer whose bestselling novel Mountain Holler explores the decaying town’s criminal underworld; he ponders the town’s fraught history after racists burn a cross on the lawn of the Black provost of a nearby university. In this storyline, Henrietta is Henry’s infant daughter and dies two days after her birth, pitching the writer into a spiral of anger and despair. Henrietta is then reimagined by Robert Montgomery, a lonely widower who mourns at her graveside and then writes a graphic novel for kids—included here, complete with Clarke’s vivid full-color cartoon illustrations. It depicts her as a socially awkward schoolgirl whose parents suggest that she slow down and savor life. In Henrietta’s intertwining plotlines, Williams delves into themes of innocence and ambition, unhinged grief, continuity, and remembrance. His prose is supple and as changeable as Henrietta herself, shifting from dreamy lyricism (“if he stared at the moon long enough and he let his eyes relax just so, the moon blurred and transformed from a light in the sky, a satellite, into a hole—a hole in the darkness through to something brighter”) to gritty realism full of evocative details: “The flames were lipping higher than his roof. The crackle and snapping sounds made him nauseous. Like breaking bones or the crack of a whip.” The result is a captivating read that’s poignant and magical.
A beguiling and luminous tale of loss and hope.Pub Date: June 17, 2023
ISBN: 9798830898652
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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