A confident, original but slightly wearying debut.
Japan welcomes the West in this historical tale from a first-time novelist.
In 1865, Aurelia Bernard was a little girl living with her mother and her uncle, a Catholic priest, in New York. By 1866, she was an orphan, working as a servant for the Shin family in Kyoto. The head of the Shin household—a large, impressive old man Aurelia refers to as “the Mountain”—is a master of the tea ceremony. When the novel begins, the Mountain enjoys the high status and state-subsidized income of an artist. But Aurelia’s story encompasses the Meiji period, when Japan was opened to Westerners and their modern ideas and technologies, and when indigenous phenomena like the tea ceremony—as well as its practitioners—continued to exist only by adapting to a strange new reality. This is not, however, the type of sweeping historical fiction that musters a cast of thousands. It is, instead, a record of one family’s fortunes during a tumultuous time. The central character is not Urako—the name Aurelia receives from her new family—but Yukako, the Mountain’s daughter. She’s a compelling character, and Urako is an observant and generally eloquent chronicler. Readers who enjoy historical fiction for the exotic details will appreciate her depictions of women with blackened teeth, the care and maintenance of kimono and, of course, the intricacies of the tea ceremony. But Urako is, perhaps, a little too faithful to the history she’s describing. Few events, it seems, are beneath her notice, and neither the narrator nor the author seems willing to distinguish interesting incidents from tedious bits of exposition. When the politics of the Meiji Restoration impoverish the Shin family, the Mountain’s mother makes several trips to the pawn shop, while Yukako embarks on some rather bold and innovative entrepreneurial endeavors; the latter are much more exciting than the former, but both receive much the same narrative attention. Avery writes with a self-assured lyricism—her poetic images are often quite arresting, and only occasionally florid or clichéd—but this doesn’t entirely offset the glacial pace of the story.
A confident, original but slightly wearying debut.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59448-930-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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