More discipline and fewer pyrotechnics would have served this story well. For the moment, in the Rhett Butler–ish words of...
Edgar Allan Poe meets Bruce Catton: a mishmash of historical novel, thriller, and psychological study set in Civil War–era Louisiana.
It stands to reason that if someone were to have bitten a person's ear off in the days before Mike Tyson, he or she might have earned a fitting sobriquet of savagery. So it is with Elise Durel, in New Orleans for her first dance and the victim of unwanted attentions, who now, 18 years later, is known as “Mademoiselle le Cannibale” or—shades of Anne Rice—“ ’Ti Vampire.” High-strung only begins to describe her, and things go from bad to worse when her 12-year-old son, his father Angel Woolsack of Wascom’s debut, The Blood of Heaven (2013), goes missing. It being New Orleans, anything can happen, especially in a dislocated time when the Confederate regulars have just fled in droves, “overtaken by the Federal blue,” and an occupying Union force led by a memorably corrupt, porcine general racked by “burning diarrheal evacuations” is now in charge. But is it really? Not in a city in which the stamp of the devil is common currency and all kinds of bestial things happen, the more distaff of them “bolstering the general’s growing impression that the women of this city are more twisted than the men.” Wascom’s yarn is shaggier than 10 sheepdogs, and while there’s much of merit in the book, it’s relentlessly overwritten, as if the shade of Cormac McCarthy had been summoned to the Ouija board and ping-ponged a text from some other dimension where the dictionary is better exploited than in our own. Beneath the showy language and endless allusion (one character, in an evident nod to Poe, is named Ligeia) lies a potentially satisfying thriller packed with meaningful malice (as with, for instance, a banner embroidered with the motto “the she-adder’s venom is as deadly as the he-adder’s”). Getting to it, though, takes a lot of work.
More discipline and fewer pyrotechnics would have served this story well. For the moment, in the Rhett Butler–ish words of Angel, “It doesn’t make a damn.”Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2361-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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