Uneven, but worth reading for its intimate look at a little-known community.
Pavees, or travelers, are a distinctive Irish sub-culture which Cummins celebrates in this uneven first novel, following her memoir A Rip in Heaven (2004).
They criss-cross Ireland in their wagons, mending pots and pans (hence the derogatory “tinkers”) and doing farm work, though by 1959, when the novel is set, the work is drying up. We see them through the eyes of 11-year-old Christy Hurley, a lively kid but one racked by guilt, because his mam died in childbirth and he feels he killed her, despite the protestations of his well-meaning father. Christy’s role model is his Grandda; he has a fond memory of helping Stephen, as capable as any vet, birth two foals for a desperate farmer. They kept the sickly one; now the colt Jack is Christy’s best friend. Grandda has just died as the novel opens; according to Pavee custom, his wagon and possessions must be burned. Christy grabs a newspaper photo from the flames, sensing its significance, though he can’t figure out the man, woman and baby it depicts, and he has another preoccupation: school. His first time. Though he loves reading, he’s stuck in with the third graders, but the staff are friendly; there’s even a sweet, mothering nun, a welcome change from the usual ruler-wielding harpy. Cummins does a fine job showing us Pavee culture: the joy of the open road, the fear of houses (they induce claustrophobia), the dutiful Catholicism, the need for mooching (panhandling) and occasional petty theft. But the coming-of-age narrative is weak. Christy does some sleuthing and discovers he’s the baby in that photograph; his mother never died in childbirth. That was a lie, his shame-faced father explains, at great length. What follows is a frantic moonlit ride, bullets, blood and a torrent of tears as Christy learns about the “dream-poison of love.” It’s all over-the-top, a far cry from the powerful realism of that barnyard birthing.
Uneven, but worth reading for its intimate look at a little-known community.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-451-22948-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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