An absorbing, atmospheric tale of racial reckoning and a blues-infused coming-of-age.
A White high school football star questions his future after a Black father and daughter move to his Arkansas town in this novel.
Johnny Spink is in the Florida Keys, living with an uncle and completing his senior year of high school. Sporting a facial scar, Johnny “had to leave Spinkville last Thanksgiving” after finding “an old, gnawed boot” with “something slimy—bones, mangled, and stinking!” in his mailbox. Then Johnny reveals how he ended up in Florida, going back a few months to that “Ozark town named for my ancestors.” He is the Arkansas town’s high school football hero—with the requisite cheerleader girlfriend—and the son of the rich mayor. Even though it’s 2000 and he is “supposed to like rap, country, alt rock, or head-banging music,” Johnny is deeply drawn to the Delta blues. He is also becoming increasingly educated about his area’s “heart-breaking record of race relations,” with Spinkville having few Black inhabitants given the “hospitality” shown them in the past. Johnny is also feeling the pressures of preordained destiny, exemplified by his coach, indeed the whole town, hoping that he can make a record 1,000-yard gain at an upcoming game. Then Johnny is jolted by the arrival of a Black family: Charles Futrelle, the town’s new poultry plant manager, and his smart, striking daughter, Rae, who joins Johnny’s class. Charles becomes a fishing buddy and mentor and shares his memories of being on the University of Arkansas’ “scout team,” essentially “tackling dummies” and seeing “Black boys getting crippled so white coaches can win!” Johnny realizes that Rae is his first true love, but she is wary of him, more focused on her future at Princeton. As tensions build, Johnny takes a solo road trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to fully delve into his beloved blues. The experience is certainly life-changing, since it is there that Johnny receives that scar and then, upon returning home, makes remarks that anger his community, leading him to start anew in the Sunshine State.
The rather sweet, yearning nature of Gaspeny’s hero is a large part of the novel’s charm. Johnny visibly shakes when he finally gets to kiss elusive dream girl Rae. He also remains undaunted in his reverence for the blues by the tale’s end: “I knew from my music there would always be something lurking along the road out to grab and drag me down. But, with the blues as my rock of faith, I thought I could keep my balance and move on, even if I was only stumbling in flip-flops.” The engrossing story’s discussion of racial matters is naturally more complex. Charles’ recounting of his time as a scout is indeed powerful testimony of this particular Black experience in the South. Johnny is also characteristically sincere in describing his time in Clarksdale: “I had a small sense of what black people had to experience because down in the Delta my white skin made a black man hate me.” Yet the furor created by his remarks, with Johnny noting he was “attacked by the NAACP and defended by Black Muslims” and now often feels a “fugitive’s dread,” feels a bit extreme, although it’s sadly reflective of tragically pervasive racial divides.
An absorbing, atmospheric tale of racial reckoning and a blues-infused coming-of-age.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60489-332-8
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
