This family-inspired history tells a compelling story while straddling genres.
In Mason’s historical novel, a young enslaved man escapes to join the Union army during the Civil War.
In this impassioned and historically grounded book, the author draws on both research and family oral tradition to recount the experiences of his ancestor, Parson Sykes. After researching and planning their escape, in 1864 Parson and his two brothers leave the Virginia plantation where they have spent their lives, elude pursuers and slave-catchers, and make their way to a Union army camp, where they enlist in one of the recently formed Black regiments and join in the fighting until the war’s conclusion. Parson’s decision to liberate himself and his brothers is born of an awareness that being enslaved is an abhorrent condition and a fortuitous set of circumstances (he is literate, and a part-time job at the local railroad station gives him access to outside news and information about the wider world) that allow him to move from intention to action. The book establishes the historical context for Parson’s experience of enslavement shortly before the Civil War by connecting it to local history, as he and his family lived in the region of Virginia where, a generation earlier, Nat Turner had led an uprising that terrified white enslavers and solidified their commitment to maintaining the practice of slavery. The author also provides a detailed explanation of how the United States Colored Troops were established and how they fit into the military and racial hierarchy of the North. The book, the first in a planned trilogy about Parson, offers an insightful and informative look at a crucial piece of history through the experience of a single person. Mason presents the book as a novel, but readers are likely to experience the book more as a biographical or historical work than as a piece of fiction. The narrative centers documentary evidence and historical context as much as plot, and there is no dialogue. The characters’ actions are generally described rather than dramatized (“Parson and his brothers devised passive resistance by damaging equipment, working slowly, and keeping their human rights and religious beliefs alive”). While the book is effective as a history, as a novel it has its shortcomings.
This family-inspired history tells a compelling story while straddling genres.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2022
ISBN: 9780999133118
Page Count: 233
Publisher: PublishDrive
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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