An impressive tale of a fractured Southern family with richly drawn characters.
A debut novel traces the fortunes of a Mississippi family from the 1890s to the 1940s.
The McMolison family of Leaf Creek consists of Bill and Kate and their children, Katherine, Hannah, and Samuel. It is Hannah, the middle child, who carries the story. Early on, Samuel, while just a toddler, is accidentally killed by his brutal, demanding father, and this begins what might be called the McMolisons’ self-inflicted curse. Headstrong Katherine marries Stephen Neal, a preacher whom Bill can barely tolerate. But it is the dutiful Hannah who brings on the real disaster by falling in love with Thomas Stokes, son of Bill’s friend John Stokes. Bill and John are powerful, ambitious men whose word in their families is law. Young Thomas, a student at Ole Miss, is handsome, charming, and callow; Hannah, still in high school, becomes hopelessly smitten. From their one and only carnal encounter, she gets pregnant. The two fathers quickly come up with a plan: a quiet marriage followed by a quick annulment and the adoption of the infant, preferably by a couple far away. The day before a pair from Alabama is due to arrive, Hannah flees with her baby, Joseph, to Katherine and Stephen’s house in Hattiesburg. Bill swears to track them down. Meanwhile, there are family secrets to be revealed.
One would think that Abraham, a talented storyteller, has several novels under her belt, such is the level of expertise shown here. Hannah is a wonderful character who goes against all of her upbringing to defy her father (something that Thomas hasn’t the guts to do). But even more remarkable is Bill. He is a brute and a hypocrite, but perhaps the saddest thing is his rock-solid conviction that his way is the best way, the unquestionable way. He can’t begin to understand that Hannah may not want to surrender her baby so that she can preserve the family and move forward as if nothing had ever happened. (By the way, he sees nothing wrong in being unfaithful to Kate—a man has needs, after all.) Honor—deadly, corrupting honor—is all. The author offers vivid details about this troubled family and the colorful Mississippi setting. Here is a description of the mayhem as Hannah’s puppy, Lost, romps in the bracken: “Brown, shiny bugs crawled over partially rotten stumps and along secret paths under the weeds. Grasshoppers jumped in every direction to avoid Lost’s big paws, and a bevy of birds flew upward from the bushes while chirping strong frustration at the intruder. The rabbits wisely and quickly moved deeper into the woods to get away from the activity.” Minute descriptions such as these are the rule, not the exception. Finally, the last chapters deliver deep satisfaction, chronicling the fates of the various players and bringing readers right up to the 1940s with a Dickensian conclusion.
An impressive tale of a fractured Southern family with richly drawn characters.Pub Date: May 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-75923-3
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Greene Woods Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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