A powerful sense of time and place infuses this well-crafted, disturbing family tale.
A mysterious house lies at the center of this debut historical novel.
Barr’s book begins with a passage about the history of a house that once graced Burnt Pot Island, off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. The “small, but well-built house stood completely furnished with chairs and dishes from a long-ago date and time,” but “no one knew who built the house or why.” This mystery generates the plot of this tale set in the 1920s. The novel interweaves the stories of Catherine Williams, a Geechee woman with “bright skin and green eyes”—who works as a shucker for Mr. Scarlotti, owner of Scarlotti Oysters—and her beautiful daughter, Licia, “the most fearless child Catherine had ever known.” When it becomes clear that Mr. Scarlotti’s desire for 13-year-old Licia is uncontainable, Catherine commands her husband to take the girl to Skidaway Island. There, she can live under the protection of her older brother, Willie, who works for the White men who run a moonshine operation (“the Shine Boys,” who do “their business...with no worry about the law, murdering anybody who interfered”). After Licia’s arrival on Skidaway, she catches the eye of the mayor, Howard Waterman, who concocts an idea to build a house for her on Burnt Pot, an island known as “nothing but a hammock. Sixty acres of marsh and deep woods,” so he can keep her hidden for nefarious reasons. Soon, Howard is plying Licia with gifts: “High-heeled shoes, fancy dresses, and lacy lingerie.” Quickly, Licia learns that she is also required to service Howard sexually. While she is dazzled by his gifts, she knows that she is not safe. It is up to Catherine to rescue her daughter and risk everything for her family’s freedom. Barr’s novel offers a well-researched and carefully plotted story with two striking protagonists. At one point, Catherine tells her daughter: “Sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. The Lord helps them what helps themselves.” The author’s descriptions of the harsh landscape are vivid and evoke the danger faced by these strong women. The marshlands are “tangled with brush and vines…Marsh grass rooted in quicksand at low tide and under water at high, covered what wasn’t pine woods or prickly palmetto.”
A powerful sense of time and place infuses this well-crafted, disturbing family tale.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66672-704-3
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Resource Publications
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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