On message, but with refreshing subtlety.
Indian author Nair’s first US publication offers a quietly powerful feminist message in the story of a middle-aged spinster, one who finds the courage and support to live independently as she and her fellow passengers on an overnight train share their stories.
Like so many travelers linked by chance and circumstance—here the six-berth overnight Ladies Coupe—the women tell their stories to pass the time, while Akhila, the protagonist, listens and adds her contributions. Now 45, Akhila gave up her education when her father died and she became the family breadwinner. She’s spent her life providing for them and now is taking a vacation to decide what she should do with the time left to her. Her siblings are shocked that she wants to live alone—she should be with the family, contributing her salary to their well-being—but Akhila is tired of their greed and self-absorption, and wants to live as she pleases. Listening to the other women, Akhila soon realizes that her feelings are not unusual. Between each story, Akhila adds her own: her brief affair with Hari, a younger man; a Christian friend who introduced her to eggs, a food her devout Hindu family thought unclean; and her thwarted efforts to live alone after her mother’s death. The first passenger’s tale is told by the elderly Janaki, who recalls how a visit to her son convinced her to live only for her husband, whom she loved deeply, rather than her selfish children. Sheela, a teenager, remembers her closeness to her imperious grandmother, who has just died; Margaret, a chemistry teacher, describes how she finally got even with her tyrannical, and possibly perverted, husband; wealthy Prabha, a wife and mother, tells of recapturing her independence when she learned to swim; and Mari, who was raped as a teenager, relates how she hated the son she bore as a result, even indenturing him to gain money, until she was ashamed of what she had done. As the journey ends, Akhila is ready to act.
On message, but with refreshing subtlety.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32087-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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