The writing is exact and assured, the story complex and rewarding. Fans of John Sayles’ film Matewan will find this a...
Lyrical, quietly powerful debut novel from a young, prizewinning short story writer.
West Virginia native Null locates his century-plus–past yarn in the hollers and folds of Tuscarora County, “near the hinge of western Maryland,” where, as he memorably writes, “the natives—Seneca, Shawnee—had been wise enough to treat this as vague hunting ground, not a place to plant yourself.” That’s just so with the three New Yorkers ("the absentees," Null calls them) who wander in at the beginning of the tale, plant their figurative flag, and set about extracting what they can from country they will never see again—timber, mostly, but then coal and other resources. Their first fear is that the country will play out; when it doesn’t, their fears turn to the people who have, in fact, planted themselves there and are increasingly resentful of selling their birthrights for less than a mess of pottage. One, with the portentous name Cur Greathouse, the moral center of the story, spends his time sorting out how he and his kin can best pull a living out of the mountains in peace, knowing full well that “living in failure is easy”; his fellow timber man Amos Church has less neighborly designs on the one absentee who is in fact not absent but spends time in a town so new that there’s not a brick in view—a good safeguard, that absentee remarks, against having your head bashed in. Violence is commonplace in the timber camps and little towns of this ridge-and-bottomland country, and everyone’s a little worse for the wear, from the sawyers to the whores to the traveling peddlers and even the bosses. Against a backdrop of labor unrest and the growing destruction of the old-growth forest, Null weaves a morality play of many threads: who will betray whom and at what price?
The writing is exact and assured, the story complex and rewarding. Fans of John Sayles’ film Matewan will find this a kindred work and just as good.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-940596-08-2
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Lookout Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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