An accomplished writer celebrates the nascent inspiration of a legendary one in this tender, affectionate, and terribly fun...
A young Robert Louis Stevenson is regaled by his landlord in tales of high adventure
For a few months in 1879-1880, the scrappy, sickly “writer of slight essays” Robert Louis Stevenson resided at the boardinghouse of Mrs. Mary Carson on Bush Street in San Francisco while awaiting the liberation of his beloved Fanny from a cruel marriage so that she might marry him, despite her greater age and the disapproval of his parents. From these slight facts, Doyle (The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be, 2016, etc.) has spun a yarn composed of the spun yarns of another, those told by Stevenson’s landlady’s husband, John Carson, a seafaring man adept at telling a tale—“when John Carson told a story you were soon inside the story yourself"—as Carson tells stories and Stevenson drinks them in, sitting by a fire in the parlor, awaiting the fine dinners of Mrs. Carson. From tracking and rescuing a kidnapped boy in the jungles of Borneo to encountering a stalwart girl who is the only surviving inhabitant of a stone village in Ireland to bringing to refuge a fragile chaplain shattered by what he witnessed in the American Civil War, the kind and brave Carson has earned his narrative authority. He feeds young Stevenson’s appetite for tales as Mrs. Carson feeds his threadbare body. Both Carsons guide the “capering boy inside the illusion of maturity” as Stevenson devours all they have to offer. In Doyle’s deft hands, we are shown how the Carsons influence the young Stevenson to appreciate and explore his own gifts as a storyteller and to contemplate the reward he might find in writing adventurous tales of his own. From them, he learns "about the nature and power of stories...about how stories actually shape our lives.”
An accomplished writer celebrates the nascent inspiration of a legendary one in this tender, affectionate, and terribly fun homage to the joys of storytelling and storytellers.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10052-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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