An overlong but often enjoyable historical tale about surviving hardship.
A young Jewish woman in New York City takes a life-changing job in this epistolary novel from Lawler (The Saints of Lost Things, 2014).
Ambitious 22-year-old Miriam Levenson is the Barnard College School of Journalism’s top graduate, but jobs for female reporters are scarce during the Great Depression. Miriam’s family, once prosperous brownstone residents, now occupy a squalid apartment and pawn their belongings to make rent. She eventually takes a position with the Federal Writers’ Project, a program that, among other things, pays writers to record oral histories. She moves to Shreveport, Louisiana, for her first assignment, shortly after reluctantly accepting a marriage proposal from Irving, a young businessman who could save her family from poverty. One Shreveport resident quickly seizes her interest: 94-year-old Bridget Fenerty. The book then alternates between Miriam’s diary entries and transcripts of her interview with the elderly woman. Like many Irish families fleeing famine, Bridget’s immigrated to New Orleans in the mid-1800s. Her father didn’t survive the voyage, and later, after her mother’s death, she was forced to take a full-time maid position at the age of 11. Bridget then kept house for families before, during, and after the Civil War. She lost loved ones to that conflict, as well as to accidents, illness, and addiction. In one heartbreaking sequence, her fleeing Confederate employers kidnap her young son and take him to Brazil. She befriends Solomon Rusk, a freed slave who helps in her pursuit of her child. As Miriam listens to Bridget’s story, she reckons with her own impending marriage as well as her growing attraction to Ellie, a local artist. Lawler’s historical research yields vivid, lived-in settings and characters, and he viscerally transmits what it really meant to be a young Irish maid in antebellum New Orleans. He also shows how Bridget’s life was punctuated by instances of grace and connection, as well as by moments of tragedy. Some chapters suffer from overwriting, however; Miriam’s diary entries seem true to life, effectively depicting the thoughts of a learning young writer, but they move the plot along very slowly, due to an abundance of description and introspection. Bridget’s interview is far more engaging and vivid as it depicts a tragedy-marred life led with persistent energy and optimism, although the story’s tension slacks during the book’s final third.
An overlong but often enjoyable historical tale about surviving hardship.Pub Date: May 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5306-0781-5
Page Count: 444
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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