A dense but intriguing account of a Black family in and out of slavery.
A fiction collection sequel spins more tales of a 19th-century Black American family.
Sarah Freedom, the free daughter of two enslaved people stolen from Fante-land in Africa, has seen and heard a lot in her time. Now, on the cusp of the American Civil War, the practiced storyteller sets down further chapters of her life and the histories of those around her. There are the peregrinations of Caesar, the Shawnee warrior with African ancestry who fought against the Americans in the War of 1812 and rescued Sarah and her brothers from slavery. There are the many tall tales of her brother Dan, who served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, owned a stagecoach business in Cincinnati, and fathered numerous children by numerous women. There’s the account of Sarah’s other brother, Robin, known as a “Colonel” for the escape that he helped plan after being captured and enslaved again in Georgia. Set mostly in an Ohio Quaker community composed of both Black and White residents, the book covers the entirety of the Antebellum period and represents a patchwork of experiences, all happening in a time when slavery still touched every facet of American life. Wilson’s prose is highly textured, resurrecting a past that is every bit as fractious and fraught as the present. Storytelling is central to the understanding of Sarah’s history, not just for her, but for nearly every other character as well. “Why not die like men and women who was worth being re-remembered?” asks Robin. When someone tells him that the word is remembered, he responds: “No it ain’t….We was already remembering we was born to be warriors and it was for others to remember us more than once if they had good sense, and this land is as mean as I think it is.” Though the work bills itself as a collection of stories, the pieces read less like short tales than vignettes or anecdotes. The book is highly researched, and the author isn’t afraid to get bogged down in the details, even at the expense of narrative momentum. Those who have enjoyed his previous effort will likely be satisfied with this continuation of his project.
A dense but intriguing account of a Black family in and out of slavery.Pub Date: May 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-955062-46-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Running Wild Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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