Dazzling and occasionally ponderous experimental fiction.
A group of adventurers set out on a perilous journey to find a magic artifact—one that may be key to their survival in this debut historical novel.
During the French Revolution, the titular sieve—resembling a pair of large metal bowls on top of a square pillar—mysteriously appears to Monsieur Jean-Luc Descoulis, giving him the power to double whatever this magical item touches. While Descoulis sees the sieve as “the eraser of man’s burden,” his colleague Armand Dupuis notices that the copies created by the sieve grow progressively weaker: Pens don’t have as much ink, chickens are progressively skinnier and sicklier, and so on. Yet Descoulis sees it as a way for humans to live forever. Then the narrative leaps to the year 1964, when a group of men from wildly different backgrounds are drawn together for one common purpose: They intend to find the now-lost sieve, rumored to be somewhere in the Sonoran Desert. These adventurers include Grant Wyatt, a bitter archaeologist; Abram, an assassin; Jean-Michel Descoulis, a priest who spearheads the search; Cassius O’Mills, a former actor caught up in the Irish Republican Army; Ken, a floundering young man; Izuki, a depressed Japanese office worker; and Rod Arch, a disgraced former lawyer. While there is plenty of action to keep things moving, the story thrives on philosophical inner monologues interspersed with intense scenes of graphic violence (“Jaunito lay dead, the weight between his head and the table cracking the stick in half, blood with bubbles spurting and pooling over the table and floor”). Prenn favors a loose, stream-of-consciousness writing style—but this can prove challenging when it results in, for example, nine pages of prose with no paragraph breaks: “A blank spot in that vision, those mazes drawn on his apartment walls all paths to the same spot, his open window, where the unspeakable center would be....Time skips.” But those who relish digging into the ethical and religious ambiguities of deeply flawed humans will find enough substance here to stay engaged.
Dazzling and occasionally ponderous experimental fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2023
ISBN: 9798371597236
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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