An entertaining, decidedly offbeat coming-of-age story.
Jean, an 18-year-old Cameroonian, confronts the threat of terrorism, police corruption, and his awakening sexuality as he searches for his older brother.
Twenty-year-old Roger has run away from home in the southern city of Douala, hoping to become a soccer star in Europe—and to escape the beatings of his fanatical Christian mother in the aftermath of his boozing father's death. Owing to his scholastic success and gentler disposition, Jean (who narrates) is Mama's boy. But torn between his raging mother and resentful brother, he's been living in a constant state of anxiety and doubt that only intensifies when he tries to catch up with Roger before he manages to leave Cameroon. In light of Boko Haram attacks, unsavory street characters, and the mostly Muslim northerners' deep-seated hostility toward Christian southerners, the road north is paved with danger. Equally scary for Jean is his attraction to Roger's friend Simon, who accompanies him and whose nakedness in one scene causes "this horrendous throbbing in my chest, and especially down there...I beg for God's forgiveness." There's a lot to unpack in this short novel, but Lobe leavens his dark political themes and cultural commentary with a breezy narrative style, entertaining pop-culture references, and off-color humor: A train traveler is subjected to a strip search by police, who discover the "big thing" he appears to be hiding in his pants is his amazing "plantain." Jean's fixation on and nasty comments about female body parts is less humorous, even if they are a manifestation of his feelings of weakness and self-doubt. This is the Geneva-based Lobe's first book to appear in English, and it should open the door to more translations of his work.
An entertaining, decidedly offbeat coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63542-174-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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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