Eve is a natural storyteller; too bad the paint-by-numbers ending undermines her riveting portrait of the lost culture of...
Eve (The Family Orchard, 2000) re-creates the exotic, unfamiliar world of Yemen’s complex Jewish community from the 1920s through its wholesale exodus to Israel in 1949-50 through one young woman’s eyes.
The Damari family lives in Qaraah, a small Northern Yemen village, where their loving but sickly father owns a leather shop. In 1923, the local enforcer of the Orphans Decree—an actual law that allowed Muslims to forcibly remove and adopt fatherless Jewish children—shows particular interest in 5-year-old Adela Damari. Given her father’s precarious health, Adela grows up under a cloud of fear. The only way to avoid adoption is to become betrothed, a common-enough event for children in her culture. Unfortunately, Adela’s fiances keep dying, one of several bits of semimagical realism in the novel. Finally, thanks to her tough-minded mother’s trickery, Adela finds herself engaged at age 8 to her first cousin Asaf, recently arrived with his spice-merchant father from India. Their childhood romance progresses until Asaf must leave Qaraah with his father. Not yet in puberty, Adela pines for him, but her life changes dramatically in 1930 when another uncle moves to Qaraah with his wife, Rahel, a healer and gifted henna dyer—who knew henna was important in Eastern Jewish culture?—and their daughter, Hani. Despite her tradition-bound mother’s disapproval and distrust, Adela is immediately drawn to her sophisticated, imaginative and warmhearted relatives. Hani, who teaches her to read, becomes Adela’s most trusted friend. Rahel teaches her the art of henna. But happiness shatters in 1933 when drought and illness strike. Adela, now a young woman of 15, flees with Hani’s family to British-controlled Aden. Asaf reappears in their lives the next year. Suddenly the novel switches gears: Leisurely, slightly mystical, bittersweet reminiscence gives way to rushed melodrama as betrayal and sexuality mix under the long shadow of World War II.
Eve is a natural storyteller; too bad the paint-by-numbers ending undermines her riveting portrait of the lost culture of Yemeni Jews.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4027-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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