A promising debut that aims high but stumbles.
In his debut novel, Colvin tracks three generations of an African Canadian family hailing from the fictional settlement of Woods Bluff in Nova Scotia, a dizzyingly diverse community founded in the 18th century by itinerant Americans, bold Africans, and rebellious Caribbean blacks.
We enter this world in 1918 alongside Kath Ella Sebolt, a bright young girl who soon earns a scholarship to attend college in Montreal. As she drifts away from Woods Bluff, she gets close to Omar Platt, an exiled African American from Mississippi. Kath eventually becomes pregnant with Omar's son, Little Omar. But with Omar out of the picture, and her life firmly set in Montreal, Kath marries a white man named Timothee, who adopts Little Omar as his own. Renamed Etienne, Little Omar struggles with his racial identity. He becomes an academic, has a son of his own, and moves to Alabama, where he and his son, Warner, must reckon with racial realities and their family history. Colvin's storytelling ranges back and forth in time, unearthing his fictional community's history, examining everything from the uses of baby dolls to cure fevers to the origins of the phrase "You're a lying crow." This results in an exploration of how time and migration can change a family and impact its experience of race, but it can also turn the narrative into a confused jumble of incidents. Important characters like Kiendra, Kath's prankster friend whose antics doom her, are too thinly drawn to have the impact Colvin intends. Meanwhile, time that could be used to round out these characters is spent on detours that don't pay off. Colvin's prose can also plod. A scene in which Kath throws a rock to avenge Kiendra's fate means to stun the reader but mostly frustrates. "The rock descends toward the window, moving and tumbling and cutting....A fraction of an inch before the window pane, the rock's leading edge shakes off the last bit of dust, the last length of spider filament, the last bit of rat's hair..."
A promising debut that aims high but stumbles.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-291372-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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