A spectacular novel of colonial China that should put this first-time author on the map.
Debut novelist Banks crafts a sweeping tale of seduction, betrayal and war.
This novel draws on the shared, complicated colonial history between the British and Chinese peoples and spans six decades, starting in 1937 when fighting between Japanese and Chinese troops led to the Second Sino-Japanese War. It focuses on Jardine, a young Chinese orphan who knows little of her past. In 1997, Jack Morgan, an elderly, dying Kentuckian who has lived in China for decades, summons Jardine to his apartment and tells her, “The woman who kept you from knowing who you are has recently died.” That woman, Violet Summerhays Morgan, was Jack’s long-suffering, infertile wife and the daughter of Percival Summerhays, Jack’s benefactor and boss. Jealous of Jack’s imagined and real affairs, Violet cheated, lied and even murdered in her attempt to win Jack’s love and destroy her competition. But in 1937, Jack met and fell in love with Ana, a Russian émigré, and had a daughter with her named Bella. That girl’s fate, and Jardine’s, is inextricably bound to that of her parents’ and those of their many friends and enemies in business and romance. Banks’ evocative prose is impressive throughout: “Algy knew he’d always remember this moment, the sound of the clock on the wall ticking, the man’s hand as it clutched the bottle, and the look of the wife, slow and hateful, as they drank her liquor and her happiness.” The plot twists like ginkgoes in the wind as the characters cruelly betray one another. As Jack tells Jardine, “Modern man is no better off; he only thinks he is because he has television and gadgets, can shit in a flush pot, and see the world—still a savage, though.” In the end, Banks delivers an engaging tale of forgiveness and the strength of familial ties, even when those ties have been frayed almost to extinction.
A spectacular novel of colonial China that should put this first-time author on the map.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475956375
Page Count: 532
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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