Historical fiction that feels uncomfortably relevant today.
Russell (Epitaph, 2015, etc.) offers a lesson in American labor relations in this fictional portrait of Anna Klobuchar Clements, a 25-year-old miner’s wife who led a wildcat strike against the large Calumet, Michigan, copper mining company Calumet & Hecla in 1913.
Though little remembered today, Annie Clements acquired the soubriquet “America’s Joan of Arc” for her leadership during the monthslong labor uprising involving as many as 9,000 miners. Annie comes across as a larger-than-life heroine—physically striking at 6-foot-1—although also a warmhearted woman with an increasingly conflicted emotional life. Initially she seems no different from other miners’ wives, stretching pennies to keep house while accepting her husband Joe’s drunken bluster and beatings without complaint. Her sorrow is that after seven years of marriage she has yet to conceive. Instead of motherhood, Annie has thrown herself into her responsibilities as president of the Women’s Auxiliary of Local 15, the Western Federation of Miners. No matter that Joe refuses to join the union. A miner’s death pushes Annie to call for a strike to improve salaries and safety conditions. Experienced union organizer Charlie Miller (a fictional composite of two real union leaders) doubts the strike will succeed, but he recognizes that Annie is a powerhouse he must support. Charlie invites photographer/reporter Michael Sweeney (also a composite) to Calumet to get national coverage. Michael finds himself drawn not only to the drama of the strike, but also to Annie, who inevitably discovers she reciprocates his desire. Union icon Mother Jones makes a cameo appearance, and then there’s Annie’s real-life nemesis, James MacNaughton, the company’s general manager, whose interest in hygiene seems almost progressive until he reveals himself as a greedy capitalist committed to maximum efficiency and profit whatever the human cost. Russell writes with her usual verve, but readers will miss the emotional density of her best work, in which abundant research melts into the human drama; here, characters often feel like puppets manipulated to sell a slice of union history from a decidedly anti-capitalist angle.
Historical fiction that feels uncomfortably relevant today.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0958-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
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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