An observant and immersive work about a society in flux.
A White man recalls coming-of-age in the segregated South in Johnson’s debut novel.
Little Nickerson has lived in a Boston suburb for the last 40 years. One day, the septuagenarian gets a call from his sister, Allyn, with news of recent happenings in their hometown of LaSalle, Georgia. Municipal leaders have decided to remove a local monument to a Confederate soldier, allegedly modeled on one of Little’s ancestors, and replace it with a memorial to a local clergyman and civil rights leader. Little is happy to hear of this, although he’s concerned that the college professor chosen to speak at the event—a Black woman who grew up in the town—will be speaking out, in part, against Little’s own parents. The professor, Emogene Harrison, is the daughter of Bit, the maid whom Little’s family employed when he was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.As Little thinks back to his days in LaSalle, the novel offers readers a portrait of a Southern town lurching unsteadily from the Jim Crow era to the fight for civil rights in the ’60s and of Southern families who experienced very different versions of the same events. Johnson’s eagle-eyed prose perfectly captures the mores and frailties of his characters and their community, as when he discusses how a local Black preacher, by leading demonstrations, forced local White ministers (including the Rev. McAllister, the father of Little’s best friend) to address the issue of segregation: “For the Baptists, integration led to miscegenation….The Episcopalians and Methodists vowed to keep politics out of the pulpit. A few Presbyterians, under McAllister’s leadership, qualified as liberals—a relative term—and agreed to make mild gestures of goodwill.” It’s a subtle book, overall, and it seems less interested in making political points than in exploring the dynamics between its various characters. Although the story moves through well-trod territory, Johnson manages to bring LaSalle and its people to life in a way that often feels revelatory.
An observant and immersive work about a society in flux.Pub Date: May 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781958762042
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Arbitrary Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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