A very strong first novel that blends tough realism with the appealing strangeness of a fever dream.
Voodoo, faith and racism converge in an East Texas town—particularly within the troubled titular heroine—in this bracing debut novel.
When we first meet Ruby Bell, she’s a symbol of local disgrace: It’s 1974, and a decade earlier she returned to her hometown of Liberty seemingly gone crazy. The local rumor mill (mostly centered around the church) ponders a host of reasons: the lynching of her aunt; her being forced into prostitution as a child; a stint in New York, where she was the rare black woman in a white highbrow literary milieu. The only person who doesn't keep his distance is Ephram, a middle-aged man who braves the town’s mockery and the mad squalor of Ruby’s home to reconnect with her. Bond presents Ruby as a symbol of a century’s worth of abuse toward African-Americans; as one local puts it, “Hell, ain’t nothing strange when Colored go crazy. Strange is when we don’t.” The echoes of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are clear, but Bond is an accomplished enough writer to work in a variety of modes with skill and insight. She conjures Ruby’s fun-house-mirror mind with harrowing visions of voodoo ceremonies and the ghosts of dead children, yet she also delivers plainspoken descriptions of young Ruby’s experience in a brothel, surrounded by horrid men. And Bond can be sharply funny, satirizing the high-toned sanctimony of Liberty’s churchgoers (especially Ephram’s sister Celia) that’s really a cover for hypocritical pride and fear. Some of the more intense passages of the novel lapse into purple prose, and the horror of Ruby’s experience (which intensifies as the novel moves along) makes her closing redemption feel somewhat pat. But the force of Ruby’s character, and Bond’s capacity to describe it, is undeniable.
A very strong first novel that blends tough realism with the appealing strangeness of a fever dream.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3909-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
PROFILES
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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