Discombobulating—in a good way.
Twenty years after her last novel (Terminal Velocity, 1997, etc.), Boyd returns with a wildly ambitious page-turner that defies easy categorization.
It’s been years since we last saw Boyd's old protagonist, Ellen Burns: Now it’s 1999, and Ellen—stable and sober—is living a quiet life in Charleston, caring for her aging mother, who’s struggling with dementia. That is, until Page 8 (the book wastes no time). And then one night, after Wheel of Fortune, Ellen is startled by a familiar face on the TV news. A young mother in New Mexico has been kidnapped; her children are missing. Ellen knows that face, though she hasn’t seen it in years: It’s Ruby, her brother’s daughter, now all grown up. Not that Ellen has seen her brother, either: According to the FBI, Royce Burns is dead. Once a celebrated novelist, Royce became a fervent white supremacist, abandoned his multiethnic family, joined up with an underground terrorist organization, and was killed as part of a face-off with the feds. Or at least, that’s what they’re telling her—though she buried his ashes in a child-sized coffin, Ellen herself has never been totally convinced of his death. And so Ellen, both totally plausible and larger-than-life, finds herself rushing to Ruby’s home in New Mexico, still loyal to the idea of her family despite her brother’s crimes. But as she digs into the case alongside rugged police chief Ed Blake, she discovers Ruby’s story—and Royce’s—is even darker and more disturbing than she’d suspected. A gentle romance with Ed bubbling hesitantly in the background, Ellen sets out on a quest to find out the truth about her brother— and is forced to grapple not only with the crimes of her family, but with her own culpability as a white woman, Royce’s sister or not. Unexpectedly light, even chatty, given the subject matter—white supremacy, unspeakable violence, American extremism—the novel is a family drama with all the flourishes of a thriller.
Discombobulating—in a good way.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-067-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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