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FATHER SWEET

A beautiful portrayal of an unspeakable betrayal and the fraught path of a victim to recovery.

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A victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a predatory priest remains haunted by his trauma but discovers an opportunity to heal in this debut novel. 

In 1978, an ordinary 12-year-old Canadian boy is growing up in a small suburb of Ottawa. He’s an altar boy and a Boy Scout who is already an ardent outdoor enthusiast. The local priest Father Sweet insistently invites him out camping—just the two of them—an offer the boy attempts in vain to refuse. While out in the woods, Father Sweet becomes increasingly peculiar and physically intimate, drawing the boy into a manufactured confidence, even encouraging him to drink whiskey. The priest incrementally breaks down the boy’s defenses before he ultimately strikes, a monstrous orchestration of manipulation depicted with sensitivity by Martin. Father Sweet presents the boy a ghastly deal. In exchange for his own surrender to the priest’s advances, he’ll spare someone else: the boy’s older brother, Jamie. Years later, the victim is a wounded man, mercilessly shadowed by an unreconciled pain. But by chance, he comes across letters that provide evidence of his father’s own complicity in the church’s abuse of children, and a chance for the young man to save a boy caught in the grip of Father’s Sweet’s ghastly appetite for unsullied innocence. In achingly poignant terms, the author captures not only the protagonist’s anguish, but also the burden his father must have carried: “My father was a proud man, and he usually stood straight and tall, but I could see that when we went to church, his private sins, whatever they were, bore down on him like a load of logs and humbled him into a slouch.” Martin tackles the most gruesome of subjects with an extraordinary delicacy that never undermines the story’s brute power—it is at once darkly discomfiting but also told with admirable grace. Of course, this is a contemporaneously relevant tale as well. The author raises important and provocative questions about the Roman Catholic Church’s complicity, and the value of reforming an institution, whatever its ideals, that has fallen so deep into a moral abyss. 

A beautiful portrayal of an unspeakable betrayal and the fraught path of a victim to recovery.

Pub Date: July 30, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4597-4396-0

Page Count: 328

Publisher: Dundurn

Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2019

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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