A striking bit of fiction that proves a historical novel can be as timely as any other.
A girl seeks justice for her dead sister against the puritanical culture that killed her in Withycombe’s debut novel.
In a small New England town in 1745, 13-year-old Rebecca Grosvenor knocks on the front door of the home of the justice of the peace for three days in a row before she is finally let in to see him—a courtesy never extended to women, let alone young girls. Rebecca has a reason for her urgency: She’s come to report a murder. To be sure, the murder occurred three years ago. The victim, Rebecca’s older sister, Sarah, had died shrouded in scandal, and the people of the town—even her own parents—had been all too happy to bury the truth along with poor Sarah. In the three years since, Rebecca has developed a passionate sense of justice and learned secrets that implicate certain men in her sister’s death. She’s finally developed a plan to force the justice of the peace’s hand or else throw their rumor-driven town into turmoil. Can Rebecca finally achieve justice for Sarah and for all women oppressed by the town’s patriarchy? Or will the system that killed her sister destroy young Rebecca as well? Withycombe’s prose perfectly captures not only the texture of the period, but the pugnacity of her protagonist: “I have lived my life as an agitator and a disgrace….Sadly, one who chooses to make absolutely everything a conflict often denudes their most important messages in the end.” Based on the true story of one of America’s earliest abortion cases, the short novel could not be more relevant in the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson. In the tradition of Hawthorne and other early American writers, Withycombe’s novel resonates because it captures so well a community of neighbors and what happens when those neighbors are forced to reckon with the society they’ve built together.
A striking bit of fiction that proves a historical novel can be as timely as any other.Pub Date: May 16, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-8255-1378-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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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