Mixing religious mysticism, a panoramic view of history, a Dickensian cast of minor characters, low comedy and political...
In his sequel to The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005), Urrea continues the mythic history of his great aunt Teresita as she begins a new life in the United States after escaping her political and religious enemies in Mexico in 1893.
While a young girl in Mexico, Teresita, called the Saint of Cabora, has developed a wide following of believers in the healing power of her touch, although she insists that God does the healing and she is merely a conduit. The Mexican government believes she also foments rebellion, the reason 19-year-old Teresita and her father Tomás Urrea flee to Arizona, where her father’s best friend, a politically active newspaperman, uses her popularity to rally public sentiment against the corrupt Mexican president. Violence as well as goodness seems to follow in her wake, yet all Teresita wants is to practice her healing. She is a fascinating mix of wisdom, love of life’s simple pleasures (like ice cream) and innocence, but is she a saint? As she and alcoholic, profane Tomás—a landowner who impregnated Teresita’s Indian mother—settle into Arizona society, Mexico sends agents to kill her. They all end up dead. But a more insidious evil eventually arrives in 1899: cruel but handsome Rodriguez, who marries her, them immediately tries to kill her; worse, he destroys her relationship with Tomás and her local reputation. She has no choice but to leave Arizona. In California a consortium of questionable businessmen sets her up as a healer under a devious contract that keeps her a virtual prisoner until the lovable rogue John Van Order, a friend from her earliest Arizona days, arrives and negotiates a better deal. As her fame and notoriety spread, Teresita and John travel across the country to New York City, where she struggles to maintain spiritual clarity despite tasting earthly luxury and human love.
Mixing religious mysticism, a panoramic view of history, a Dickensian cast of minor characters, low comedy and political breast-beating, Urrea’s sprawling yet minutely detailed saga both awes and exhausts.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-15486-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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