Although it's entering a crowded field of biographies, fictional or not, of various Founding Fathers, Cobbs' meticulous...
Cobbs' novel chronicles the difficult political and family life of Alexander Hamilton.
Well before the publication date of this novel, the Broadway musical based on Hamilton’s life will in all likelihood have won many Tony awards. Can another fictional re-examination of this controversial statesman succeed in saying anything new about Hamilton—and do it without rap songs? Hamilton’s story certainly invites dramatization. Born the illegitimate son of a runaway wife on the Caribbean island of Nevis and raised in St. Croix, Hamilton is disinherited in early adolescence when his mother dies of a malarial fever. His intelligence and grit net him a clerk position with an importer and then sponsorship to leave the islands for New York to further his education. Swept up in revolutionary fervor, he becomes George Washington’s aide-de-camp, eventually winning his own command but always bucking the disadvantages of his humble beginnings. He meets his future wife, Eliza, whose father, Philip Schuyler, is a New York landholder who throws in his lot with the Continentals. Chapters narrated by Eliza alternate with chapters narrated by Alexander, and the first half of the novel lacks momentum as the characters negotiate the ponderous logistics of courtship, marriage, intrigue, jockeying for position on the battlefield and in Washington’s Cabinet, etc. It isn’t until the end of the Revolutionary War that the plot thickens. Alexander, appointed the United States' first Treasury Secretary, puts out countless fiscal fires threatening the fledgling republic’s economy. He not only refuses to own slaves, but publicly advocates for abolition. He is subjected to much unfair opprobrium, largely, it appears, because he doesn't belong to the post-revolutionary boys’ club. James Monroe, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson come off as particularly ignoble, and Aaron Burr seems downright sociopathic. Cobbs displays how Hamilton’s outsider status leaves him very little wiggle room: an extramarital affair which might have been hushed up in the right circles leads directly to his downfall.
Although it's entering a crowded field of biographies, fictional or not, of various Founding Fathers, Cobbs' meticulous account holds its own—even without catchy tunes.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-720-3
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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 deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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