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EMPTY CHAIRS

A moving depiction of a family’s struggle to stay together.

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A young boy finds himself pulled between his dedication to his small-town family and his fascination with the world beyond. 

In this debut historical novel, Joe McDowell lives on a farm in the mountains of North Carolina, frustrated by his family’s worsening financial straits. The bank demands the loan on their property be repaid sooner, and Ted, Joe’s older brother, is drafted to fight the Nazis overseas, shorting them on labor. Then an accident leaves Joe’s Dad hobbled, unable to work efficiently, and Ruthie, Joe’s sister, is obliged to temporarily leave school despite being a stellar pupil. Martha, Joe’s mother, is compelled to take a job working at a local restaurant, and peddles vegetables in town. When Martha learns that her mother has become gravely ill, she travels to Raleigh with Joe to visit her family, and he is enticed by a different world, one with tantalizingly rich cultural opportunities and the promise of escape from ceaseless poverty. His teenage sister, Katie, has already defected to city life, and while her selfish defiance irks him, he can’t help but also be drawn to an alternate destiny. Martha, too, feels it magnetism when a man from her past offers a reprieve from her family’s endless troubles. Eventually, Joe is forced to decide which realm he will inhabit, one that honors his obligations to his family’s generational business, or one that propels him into the exciting unknown. In her book, Davidson Keller delicately portrays Joe’s burgeoning inner turmoil, haunted by what he sees as Katie’s betrayal, but also her salvation. The moment Joe finally tells his father he’s thinking of leaving the farm one day is rendered in heartbreakingly poignant language: “I walked along with him, feeling tired now. I had told him, and the relief was like dropping a huge sack of potatoes. I didn’t think I would change my mind, remembering the electric surge I got watching those boys at NC State.” And Martha’s tortured ambivalence is equally affecting, a confusion Joe detects and is terrified by. This is an unusually wise work, both sensitive and powerful. 

A moving depiction of a family’s struggle to stay together. 

Pub Date: April 4, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5427-8561-7

Page Count: 356

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2017

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ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.

In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.

Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

Pub Date: May 6, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014

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THE NICKEL BOYS

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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