A gutsy, fearless protagonist leads a novel that challenges the absurdity of segregationist laws.
A rebellious New Orleans lawyer in the 1950s works on behalf of a Black couple who want to adopt a biracial child in Martinez’s novel.
Against the sultry, jazzy backdrop of New Orleans, attorney Noel Corbin, also known as Crow, has struggled with sobriety and dedicated his career to helping those who get a raw deal in the city’s corrupt legal system. Crow has been a lawyer for the Cajun mafia, and local opinions of him are mixed. (A Tulane professor tells him, “I’ve heard you’re a free spirit representing various entertainers, gamblers, nonconformists, and the occasional civil rights case using dubious methods.”) A colleague approaches Crow with a perplexing case: An evidently biracial child named Dove is caught in an absurd legal limbo due to the south’s racist laws. Her mother was white, but died soon after childbirth, and Dove’s birth certificate lists the baby as white. A Black couple wishes to adopt Dove but cannot, as the law disallows interracial adoption. The state refuses to change the birth certificate until the presumably Black father comes forward. Crow is troubled by the story and, upon meeting the prospective parents, assures them he has the contacts within (and outside of) government to give them a fighting chance. So far, the state has refused to budge, but Crow pulls from every resource he can think of to find a way for this family to have the happiness they deserve. Martinez’s legal drama, based on a real case in Louisiana, has an imperfect but likable protagonist in Crow, whose Cajun roots and legal career make the story a lively love letter to the local culture and a damning indictment of the era’s racial policies. The author’s wry sensibility regarding the legal system’s corruption is amusing and illuminating, while the absurdity of Dove’s specific case is described in a matter-of-fact, common-sense way. The novel drags somewhat in the middle as the characters await the trial, but the unexpected conclusion feels authentic.
A gutsy, fearless protagonist leads a novel that challenges the absurdity of segregationist laws.Pub Date: May 15, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 316
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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