A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes in the reader’s mind.
Against a historical backdrop of UFO sightings, a dying man tries to nudge the world along a righteous path in Kaufman’s novel.
Rhome, Texas, 1897. August Simms has returned to Rhome ostensibly to investigate reports of mysterious airships landing there. But his purpose for returning to Rhome is twofold. August is also dying and wants to spend his final days at the Martin family boardinghouse where his wife, Christy, died some 15 years before, and he wants to be buried beside her. But life keeps happening in the interim to interfere with his plans. Nadine Martin now runs the boardinghouse and doesn’t remember August at first. But her father was murdered back then, just before Christy’s death, and the true killer (as everyone knew) was spirited off by the railroad bosses; Luther Williams, an innocent local Black man, was lynched instead. August and his old friend Judge Proctor are racked with guilt over not doing enough to stop Luther’s lynching. Racism, no surprise, is alive and well in Rhome in 1897. But then something else comes to light that’s even more incendiary than anything related to racially motivated hate crime. The righteous townspeople (spurred on by the railroad crew) are enraged and will do anything they can to save innocent people in harm’s way. There are more good people to be noted, like Bill Ackerman, August’s wagon driver and wingman, and huge Bose Williams, son of Luther, and Natalie Martin, Nadine’s daughter, who is suffering the throes of adolescence. Kaufman is a fantastic writer with a distinctive poetic touch (consider such lapidary phrases as “a smile threatening the corners of his mouth” or “morning arrives like a shovel to the head”). And August Simms is a charming, sympathetic protagonist; he’s a true font of wisdom and a still point in the storms that rage in Rhome. It will be the rare reader who will not be moved by this soulful, poignant novel.
A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes in the reader’s mind.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781685132620
Page Count: 284
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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