An often vivid family saga, centered on a satisfyingly complex matriarch.
A historical novel inspired by tales of the Great Migration.
This fictionalized account of hardship, escape, and closure is based on the stories told by Loucindia, the great-grandmother of coauthors Melody Fowler and Arric Fowler. Drunetta grows up in an unnamed Southern town; she describes her people as a combination of “down home farm stock and uptown education.” She lost her first and only love, Xavier, because her parents felt she was too young at 16 to be dating. At the age of 21, Drunetta later married Abraham Brown in 1935 and started a family. Abraham, however, was unreliable; he drank at the local, illegal bar and ran around with other women. When Drunetta discovered these affairs in 1957, she helped the police arrest Abraham for a violent act he committed, and she took a train to New York City with her youngest three children; two others were already grown. Up north, she struggled to raise her family and came to rely on two very different friends: church lady Sister Rose and bar singer Miss Rayceen. The women, whose backstories readers learn, became emotionally and legally bound to Drunetta and her family, which grew as her brothers joined her in the city. Much of the story is from Drunetta’s perspective; readers will find it enjoyable to see the world through her eyes, and she’s surrounded by compelling characters as she experiences intriguing plot developments. However, Drunetta’s narrative voice is almost identical to those of some of the other narrators, which include three of her daughters. Most of the narration is set in the late 1950s and early ’60s, but the various stories encompass events further in the past; in addition, the story checks in briefly with the Browns in 1971, 1981, 1986, 2009, and 2011. At the end of her life, Drunetta makes an intriguing admission that she says provided her with the healing experience she needed—one that’s referenced in the book’s title.
An often vivid family saga, centered on a satisfyingly complex matriarch.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2022
ISBN: 9781738647026
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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