Peebles’ detailed and atmospheric story is cinematic in scope, panoramic in view, and lyrical in tone.
Samba music and its allure beats beneath this winding and sinuous tale of ambition, memory, and identity.
The long road to musical stardom followed by the privileged Graça, a Brazilian woman from a wealthy family with stakes in the brutal sugar-cane industry, runs parallel to that taken by her childhood friend and rival, Dores, the child of a promiscuous local woman who was taken in at birth by the plantation’s cook. Peebles (The Seamstress, 2008) traces the girls’ growing attachment to each other—despite divisive class distinctions in early-20th-century Brazil—and their growing enchantment with the samba style of music they first heard on the plantation before their joint escape. Their extended sojourn in the gritty and hedonistic Lapa neighborhood of Rio exposes the girls to privations and degradations but also allows them to enter the world of music they both yearn to conquer. Differences in talent and temperament strain their relationship, but shared ambition propels them toward unlikely levels of fame and notoriety as Graça transforms into Sofia Salvador, an international samba star (whose life experiences may echo those of Carmen Miranda). Alliances, romances, and friendships made by the women over the courses of their lives shift and reform as the girls from the plantation pursue pop stardom. Questions of loyalty to family, culture, and self are not always resolved in a comfortable fashion, and the scarifying price for achieving one’s dreams runs far beyond the girls’ childhood imaginations. From the perspective of old age, Dores’ recounting of the duo’s experiences is steeped in melancholy but also alludes to the unreliability of memory (and the necessity of forgetting in order to survive).
Peebles’ detailed and atmospheric story is cinematic in scope, panoramic in view, and lyrical in tone.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1099-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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