An exuberant narrator, a conjure woman, and a pirate-mad white suitor enliven this tale.
Fifth in a series of children’s books, this fictional diary recounts how a widow’s mystical sessions affect a 13-year-old slave girl’s family.
Beginning in June 1725, Camellia Cassandra writes in her diary that “nothing exciting ain’t NEVER going to happen on this here New Ashley Hall plantation!” (Her literacy, or how she got a diary, isn’t explained.) Most of the North Carolina plantation’s 43 slaves labor in the fields, but when Camellia and her two sisters get a chance to serve in the Big House, they soon discover it’s harder work than dusting a few knickknacks. Pansy Pearl, the runt, is tasked with looking after the Hightowers’ sickly baby. Then, when the plantation gets visitors—Jimbo Studebaker is courting Miss Charlene Hightower—Camellia and Myrtle Millicent are brought in to clean bedrooms and look after the guests. Though the girls no longer have to fear leeches and gators, they’re more directly under the thumbs of their white owners. If the marriage comes off, the siblings will be separated and Camellia will have to leave behind her boyfriend, Barn Boy Jesse. But when the white folks ask Ole Widow Brown, reputed to be an Obeah woman, to raise spirits of the dead, Jimbo seems more interested in pirate ghosts than his intended. Can the wedding be stopped? McWilliams (Diary of a Black Seminole Girl, Ebony Noel, 2016, etc.) writes in an entertaining, vivacious voice that’s much the same from book to book, full of capitalized words, multiple exclamation points, dialect, and many sentences beginning with “That’s when.” Although the indignities of slavery underlie the novel’s plot, Camellia’s irrepressible sense of fun stands up to them well. Widow Brown’s conjuring sessions provide much amusement. Stede Bonnet speaks: “I grow weary and wants to go back to the here and beyond where I gots BLUE SKY, WHITE CLOUDS, PURTY ANGELS, and PEACE from WHITE BOYS what think they knowd ’bout PIRATES!” An author’s note provides more information on slave narratives.
An exuberant narrator, a conjure woman, and a pirate-mad white suitor enliven this tale.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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