A winning piece of historical fiction.
An engaging, revelatory account of the trial of the century—the 19th century—following charges of adultery against Henry Ward Beecher.
The prominent Beecher family has no contemporary equivalent—a large brood of intellectuals, they helped set America’s moral compass. Catherine founded schools for girls, Isabella was a suffragette, Harriet wrote the seminal novel of slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and younger brother Henry was the famous minister of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, where he advocated the radical notion of a loving and forgiving God. Naysayers might speculate there was a bit too much love on offer at Beecher’s church, and after years of hushed rumor, Henry is accused of adultery (by radical suffragist Victoria Woodhull, out to ruin Henry for his dismissal of her ideas), and finally a suit is brought against Henry by the wronged husband. Though Henry is fascinating—slightly effete yet calculating—the novel centers on the two title sisters, and the rift the trial brought between them. Book ending the novel are the days before Henry’s death in March of 1887. Journalists are encamped on the stoop, the brownstone is filled with friends and family, with the exception of one—Isabella Beecher Hooker. Alienated from the family since the trial 12 years earlier, Isabella is at a nearby boardinghouse, hoping she’ll gain access to her brother before he dies. The story of Harriet and Isabella—with Harriet sure that blind loyalty and upholding the Beecher name is paramount, and Isabella sure that Henry is guilty and will hopefully ask forgiveness from his congregation—is not only one of family but of ideas. What best honors the Beecher name—truth or loyalty? The author manages to make rigid Harriet and foolhardy Isabella come off as admirable, sympathetic women trapped by the expectations of their family’s role in history. This could have easily become a soapy melodrama, but O’Brien (The Glory Cloak, 2004, etc.) smartly blends history about this fascinating family with moral questions that have no easy answers.
A winning piece of historical fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5220-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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