An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel.
With the American Civil War still raging, a South Carolina mother heads to the front line in Tennessee to bring home her severely injured son in Joslin’s historical novel.
It is late October, 1863, when Susannah Shelburne receives the telegram she has been dreading: Her son Francis, a Confederate soldier, has been wounded in battle. Jacob, her husband, is seriously ill, leaving her the only one who can travel to Tennessee to tend to Francis’ injuries and bring him back to Ardwyn, the family home. Susannah, the daughter of an abolitionist preacher, was only 15 years old when she married Jacob, who was 25 years her senior. He is also an abolitionist, and although he currently retains two Black servants (the elderly manservant Hawk and Letty, a personal maid to Susannah), Jacob pays them wages and has given them certificates of freedom, an arrangement necessarily kept secret from the neighbors. To Susannah and Jacob’s great dismay, Francis enlisted in the Confederate army the day he turned 18; he and his mother parted acrimoniously. Now, she heads out on the arduous journey to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, to the small farmhouse that serves as a makeshift field headquarters where Francis is located. They will spend the next five months there as she tends to his wounds, hoping to spare him the amputation of his leg. During these most difficult months of her life, she must also endure her son’s vitriol and vicious mockery. Nell’s novel is compellingly narrated by Susannah and set against the vivid backdrop of the physical, social, emotional, and familial devastations of the war. Composed in carefully textured prose filled with detailed, period-appropriate cultural minutia (“In his haversack, I found a scant handful of dried beans, another of corn kernels, and a few acorns—his sustenance for fighting all day on the side of a mountain”), the narrative reflects upon Susannah’s earlier heartbreaks even as she struggles through the current torrent of verbal abuse and physical assaults. Letty is a standout secondary character—when she eventually joins Susannah and Francis in the farmhouse, she offers support, love, hope, and critical homely wisdom in a voice seasoned by hardships.
An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781646036127
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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