A historically evocative period drama that’s poignant and disquieting.
In this novel inspired by the challenging life of the author’s grandmother, a woman is left to raise her four children alone during the 1920s.
Augusta Young is born “near the turn of the twentieth century” to a hardscrabble Arkansas farm family. At the age of 12, entering the eighth grade—the only one of her siblings allowed to remain in school this long—she is excited about receiving her diploma at the end of the term. But there is an unanticipated upheaval ahead for her. The mother of her best friend, Clara “Cookie” Church, has taken ill. Shortly after the graduation celebration, Augusta begins helping Cookie’s family, taking on the household chores Betty Church can no longer handle. When Betty dies, Augusta’s parents marry off their 13-year-old daughter to Cookie’s newly widowed father, Simon. Despite Augusta’s objections, the deal is set. Initially, Augusta finds Simon to be a caring and devoted husband. For the first time, she has store-bought clothes and ample food—until the price of cotton crashes. At 15, Augusta is pregnant and forced to move to Detroit with Simon. Poverty-stricken, they take up residence in a two-room tenement apartment. Over the next 15 years, Augusta confronts overwhelming obstacles, ultimately struggling to support her four children on a food server’s salary after Simon leaves her and the kids. The depth of her travails—and the heart of the engaging story—is revealed in Ryker’s haunting first chapter, where readers are introduced to a 20-something Augusta walking the streets of Detroit. She is hoping to get a glimpse of her fourth child, the little girl she gave up for adoption so that she could keep the other three. The bulk of the novel fills in the blanks of how she arrived at this shattering moment. Smooth-flowing prose carries the tale forward at a steady pace, although without any year markers, it is sometimes difficult to tell how much time has passed between chapters. Nonetheless, farm and city vignettes create vivid images of time, place, and economic class, and Augusta emerges as a formidable woman in the face of daunting odds.
A historically evocative period drama that’s poignant and disquieting.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781578691203
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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