by Jabari Asim ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2015
You will rarely find a historical novel that's as panoramic yet also as lean, mean, and moving as this.
An epic saga of 1970s African-American life in a Midwestern city is neatly, deftly, and evocatively compressed into three tales with overlapping characters—and destinies.
In the lingering aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, there was among African-Americans a sense of lost promise spiked with rage, anxiety, and drift. Yet by the early '70s, there was also a burgeoning sense of pride, powered by a growing perception of the many possibilities King’s movement had helped to bring about. Asim’s novel, set in Gateway City, the same reimagined version of St. Louis he depicted in his short story collection, A Taste of Honey (2010), parses these seemingly disparate forces as they act upon characters whose fates overlap in three sections. In the first, Lorenzo “Guts” Tolliver, a reformed professional “leg breaker”–turned–cab-service proprietor, struggles to free himself of his violent past but still finds himself dodging trouble while doing favors for the local crime boss, Ananias Goode. In the second, Goode, who likewise seeks a quieter, gentler life, sees his own potential salvation in his secret, if peripatetic, romance with a socially prominent pediatrician, Artinces Noel. But the competing demands of their very different callings, along with those from within their volatile, at-risk neighborhood, keep getting in the way. The third section focuses on Charlotte Divine, raised a foster child on Gateway’s meaner streets, who is now making her way through college—and through a romance as challenging as those faced by the other major characters. This narrative suite covers a lot of psychic, cultural, and historic ground, and its nature can shift from crime and suspense to love and torment in a couple of pages. Yet Asim maintains impressive control of his sinewy style and elegiac tone while also remaining solicitous toward his hard-boiled but tender-souled characters.
You will rarely find a historical novel that's as panoramic yet also as lean, mean, and moving as this.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-932841-94-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bolden/Agate
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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PROFILES
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Anthony Doerr ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2014
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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