An imaginative work craftily depicting the failure of imagination that is American racism.
A historical thriller delves into the raw, knotty roots of racial uplift and upheaval that have been transforming America up to the present moment.
In her debut, The Talented Ribkins, (2017), Hubbard ingeniously blended the motifs of superhero comic books into a bittersweet road novel tracing the scattered destinies of Black civil rights crusaders. Her follow-up departs from the fantastic but is no less inventive. It begins in 1914 New Orleans with August Sitwell, an enigmatic, circumspect Black man working as groundskeeper for an estate belonging to the Barclays, an upper-class White family no longer as wealthy as it once was. Sitwell became part of the family’s all-Black domestic staff when he was orphaned as a child and has grown to manhood working with “Miss Mamie,” the family’s prodigious cook, and, more recently, with Jennie Williams, a one-time “cakewalk dancer”–turned-maid, and three rambunctious young apprentices, also orphans, whom the family patriarch seeks to “civilize.” As the staff struggles to negotiate their lives among Southern Whites in the depths of the Jim Crow era, the Barclays, desperately seeking a way out of the financial doldrums, make a bargain with an ambitious food entrepreneur to sell Miss Mamie’s vaunted rib sauce to local markets under the brand “The Rib King” with Sitwell’s caricatured image on the label. Neither Mamie nor Sitwell are getting a cent from this transaction, and Sitwell reacts to this exploitation with an act of retribution that reverberates into the next decade as Jennie, by 1924 an entrepreneur with her own brand of beauty products to sell, has to make her perilous way through economic and political intrigue brought about in part by the decade’s surge of African American achievement. The two halves of Hubbard’s chronicle have distinct tones. And even if one prefers the deadpan gothic tactics of the first part to the pell-mell momentum of the second, one will be impressed at all times with Hubbard’s control over her historical milieu as well as her complicated, intriguing characterizations.
An imaginative work craftily depicting the failure of imagination that is American racism.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-297906-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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