In this engaging if oddly benign and probably revisionist take on the civil-rights upheaval, Mississippians cross racial...
A disarmingly sanguine first novel about the citizens, black and white, of a small Mississippi town as they prepare for the coming integration of their schools in 1966.
Cooper Connelly, a reformed alcoholic trapped in an unhappy marriage, runs Revere’s private hospital for whites. His father, a rich, segregationist state legislator, has installed Cooper as head of the local school board; but recognizing the coming of change, Cooper not so secretly welcomes the federally mandated integration of Revere’s black and white schools. Cooper’s professional counterpart is Reese Jackson, who runs the local black clinic. Born into poverty, the brilliant doctor remains bitter toward whites, despite his increasing wealth and his status as a god among his black patients. Spencer is particularly proud of his beautiful, cultured wife Deanie, who has decorated their antebellum home with exquisite taste and who dresses with understated élan. But their marriage strains under Deanie’s guilt at having injured their ten-year-old son Skippy in a car accident when he was a toddler, leaving him with a maimed leg. Deanie’s best friend is her neighbor Madame Melba. A fortune-teller from New Orleans who keeps her race ambiguous for professional reasons, Melba develops a surprising friendship with Cooper. Meanwhile, a routine investigation into the death of a white pulp worker treated in Cooper’s hospital for a gunshot wound raises public and deeply private questions about guilt and responsibility. When a local black minister is shot after an attempted restaurant sit-in, white citizens come to his support. Then Cooper is also shot, but for motives of personal vengeance, not race. Johnson has an unfortunate tendency to tease the reader with hints before revealing information about plot or characters, but to her credit, her empathy is so deep and evenhanded that her own racial identity remains a mystery.
In this engaging if oddly benign and probably revisionist take on the civil-rights upheaval, Mississippians cross racial lines with ease.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-125557-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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