Jackson’s sprightly prose and charismatic characters offer readers a rollicking good time along with the typical bromides...
An oddly cheerful story about two generations of battered wives who eventually fight back.
Jackson (The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, 2008, etc.) briefly introduced Rose Mae Lolley in her first novel Gods of Alabama when she came to Chicago looking for a high-school sweetheart ten years after he disappeared. Here Rose Mae takes center stage. Having run away from Alabama as a teen to escape her abusive father, she has ended up in Texas as Ro, married to equally abusive husband Thom Grandee. Given Ro’s spunk and charisma, her elderly neighbor finds Ro’s reluctance to leave Thom frustrating, but Jackson doesn’t shy from showing Ro’s attraction to Thom as well as her drift toward complicity in their troubled relationship. One day Ro drives her neighbor to the airport, where a “gypsy” warns her to kill Thom before he kills her. As Ro recognizes, the “gypsy” is actually her mother Claire, who long ago ran away from her own abusive marriage, though it meant leaving behind her child. Now called Mirabelle (dual names are standard in Jackson’s work), Claire lives in San Francisco, where she runs a halfway house for battered wives. Prodded by her mother’s warning, Ro soon reverts to her old Rose Mae identity and plans her escape from Thom. After her previously mentioned visit to Chicago and a trip back to Alabama to see her now pathetic father, she heads to California. Mother and daughter warily reunite. Rose Mae moves into the bedroom Claire has been keeping at the ready. While the women’s interactions prickle with resentment and guilt, mild romantic interest crops up for Rose in the person of Claire’s wispy landlord. When news comes that Thom is heading toward San Francisco, readers can assume that brutal justice is at hand.
Jackson’s sprightly prose and charismatic characters offer readers a rollicking good time along with the typical bromides about domestic abuse.Pub Date: June 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-58234-6
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Avon A/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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