A well-informed, earnest tale of life during a flailing revolution.
Two reporters covering Egypt after the Arab Spring collide with ignorance, crackdowns, and tragedy.
Hamilton’s debut follows Mariam and Khalil, a couple that comes from different backgrounds (she’s an Egyptian daughter of two doctors, he’s an American-born Palestinian and the son of musicians), who work for Chaos, a media collective determined to spread the word about ongoing government repression in Cairo. They’re engaged in deeply asymmetric warfare: as the government shifts from post-Mubarak military rule to Mohamed Morsi to Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, its strong-arm tactics become harsher, and outside support for revolutionaries is slim after the first flower of revolution in 2011; Chaos has plenty of followers and a steady stream of podcasts, but “tweets don’t stop bullets.” Hamilton, who's worked for a group similar to Chaos, captures the difficulty of arriving at factual clarity in what’s effectively a war zone, ping-ponging conflicting quotes, tweets, and Facebook posts across the page. His style and tone reveal how high the stakes are, and the confusion that prevails amid propaganda, but Hamilton’s attempts to describe more individual conflicts are only moderately successful. Mariam and Khalil, despite their affection for each other, mainly lament about Egypt’s future, and their interactions are often restricted to debating Eric Hobsbawm’s writings or engaging in lyrical, sloganeering dialogue. (“You’re marching to bring down a fascist. What more is there?” “We need a new answer. The whole world needs a new answer.”) That’s all the more frustrating because Hamilton is strong at characterization when he attempts it, as when Khalil considers his various conflicted national identities and feelings toward his father. The novel implies that there’s little time for such solipsistic musings when the presidential palace has been converted into a torture chamber, but the emotional distance dampens the impact of Hamilton’s storytelling about its victims.
A well-informed, earnest tale of life during a flailing revolution.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-12397-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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