The “very long reach of war” transcends generations.
Three women struggle to heal after the trauma of war.
Novelist and award-winning journalist Benedict (Sand Queen, 2011, etc.) continues her focus on the Iraq War, the theme of her previous novel, in a bleak, affecting tale set in a cheerless town in upstate New York. The story begins in August, when the air is sticky, the sky ominous, and a life-changing hurricane is about to arrive. “It smells wrong,” 9-year-old Juney says. Juney, who's blind, is the daughter of Rin Drummond, a single mother who served in Iraq, where her husband was killed. As a sergeant, she was called Dragon Drummond, “tough as boot leather and mean as a rattrap,” qualities now intensified by rage. Surrounding her home with fences and barbed wire, she arms herself with rifles, M4 carbines, and an ample supply of ammunition; and she raises three wolves, wild creatures with an instinct for self-protection like her own. At the local Veterans Affairs hospital, Rin encounters Naema, who was a medical student in Sand Queen and now is a pediatrician. Naema has a facial scar from shrapnel, surface evidence of deep emotional wounds: her husband, because he was an interpreter for the American Army, was “atomized into a cloud of blood” by a bomb that also took off half the leg of her young son, Tariq. After fleeing from Iraq and spending years as a refugee, Naema sees her work for the VA as an effort “to undo the war” by healing children hurt “by this terrible inhumanity.” The novel’s third protagonist is Beth, the wife of a Marine who has served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving Beth to raise their rebellious son by herself. Lonely, Beth turns to drink to numb her pain; the war infuses every moment of these women’s lives. Benedict creates a tender friendship between Tariq and Juney; although they, too, are victims of war, they have emerged as loving, intuitive, and wise. Their kindness toward one another is a rare glimmer of light in a desolate landscape.
The “very long reach of war” transcends generations.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-942658-30-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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