A very sensitive, well-written treatment of a trying time and those who lived it.
It’s 1969 in Bice’s novel, and mandated busing has come to the Richmond, Virginia, schools.
The Randolphs are a White, middle-class Catholic family. Eleanor’s father is a lawyer. Nell, as she’s known, has an older brother, Donald, and a tightly wound mother, Marjorie. In the fall, Nell will be bused to Stonewall High, which is almost all Black and underfunded. Nell isn’t comfortable there but is determined to make the best of it and perhaps even to make some Black friends. She gets a small part in the fall play. The cast of Carousel is experimentally integrated, but when a Black-cast Billy Bigelow kisses a White-cast Julie Jordan, half the audience walks out and the local paper throws a fit. At semester’s end, Nell’s mother finds her a slot at a private White school, St. Mary’s. The nuns are racist (Nell, to her relief, is expelled), her classmates, clueless privileged snobs. She winds up, also to her relief, back at Stonewall. Nell’s father is a good man, trying to make the best of this situation and do the morally right thing. Her mother is not overtly racist, but she almost vibrates at this imposition, this disruption of her orderly, traditional life. Nell does make some Black friends, but those friendships are really fragile. We learn the story through Nell’s eyes, and a finely drawn character she is (as are others, especially the problematic Marjorie). We learn in the author blurb that Bice lived through that time as student and teacher, and her experiences inform every confrontation, every confusion. It’s important that in the epilogue, Nell is recalling in adulthood what she lived through and learned from. Thus, she can look back and trenchantly say, “My curated life was about to be challenged.” In the end, Nell can agree with Fergy Sutton, her Black almost-boyfriend, that the future is not without hope for the long haul but must be faced without rosy expectations for the short term.
A very sensitive, well-written treatment of a trying time and those who lived it.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-63988-098-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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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