A heroine who plays the hand she’s dealt—nothing more, nothing less.
A fictional biography of one of North Carolina’s first female African American real estate entrepreneurs.
Josephine Leary’s home life is at the center of this novel, while her real estate investment business is conducted mainly offstage. The main conflict is with her husband, Archer, aka Sweety, making for a somewhat pedestrian tale of occasional domestic strife. Although he seemed to appreciate Jo’s business acumen before they married, Sweety needles her about her work outside the home, which is, at first, mainly in their family business, a barbershop in Edenton, North Carolina. Sweety resents the fact that Jo has her own money—derived from income properties she began buying with a wedding gift of $500 from her father, a White former Confederate officer—and when she spends it on their family, for example buying a new buggy, buying their rental house, and buying their barbershop, he feels shamed as a man. Which does not prevent him, as Josephine’s first-person narration reminds us often, from splurging on expensive whisky. Jo, her grandmother, mother, and brother were all formerly enslaved on plantations in North Carolina. Now (the narrative spans the 1870s to the early 1890s), they are all doing well in Edenton, a prosperous community that appears relatively free of racial strife. Jo is never fazed by the racism she does encounter, not to mention the sexism. A White seller refuses to deal with her on her first property purchase, until "his greed outweighs his prejudice." She dismisses racial slurs by White women as a product of poor upbringing. The worst racist aggression—three drunken former Confederates disrupt church Juneteenth festivities with a wagonload of rotten tomatoes—is investigated by the local sheriff only at the behest of Sweety, who passes for White. Although Jo’s achievements are certainly worthy of being celebrated, her relatively obstacle-free path to prosperity, as well as her fictional doppelgänger’s total lack of vulnerability, saps the narrative of tension. We’re left with a pleasant panorama of middle-class small-town life in the late 19th century.
A heroine who plays the hand she’s dealt—nothing more, nothing less.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-6368-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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
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
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