One can’t fault Kingsnorth for lack of ambition, though his story stumbles under its own linguistic weight. The reader will...
Frenchies is ycumen in—lhude sing Shazam!
The fens of eastern England, so memorably inhabited by Graham Swift in his 1984 novel Waterland, are no place for an outsider to wander into. Least of all if that outsider is a Norman, for then he’s likely to confront—well, if not Grendel, then a sturdy fellow named Buccmaster of Holland, who acts as if he owns the place. And so he does, for he lives on “three oxgangs of good land” on “an ealond in the fenns on all sides the wilde”—that is, about 60 acres on an island surrounded by wilderness and water, the kind of place where, with his peasant workers and his passel of sons, he can ignore the rest of the world. But he can’t, in the end, for with the arrival of William the Conqueror and company to the south and the Vikings to the north in that fated year 1066, Buccmaster is called on to do battle in the name of the Anglo-Saxon crown. Debut novelist and environmental journalist Kingsnorth opens with an ominous quotation from William of Malmesbury, to wit, “England is become the residence of foreigners and the property of strangers”—the sort of thing that an anti-EU type might dredge up today, perhaps, but that also nicely announces Buccmaster’s determination to keep not just the persons of the furriners out, but also their customs and manners, for “efry daeg they is cwellan us the cyng and the crist”—that is, every day the king and Christ are killing us. Kingsnorth’s use of an ever so slightly streamlined version of Old English to convey Buccmaster’s story, rich in ghosts and the old gods, is daring, but after a time it feels like a parlor trick: one wonders whether the story would have been better served with more straightforward, modern language. However, for the patient reader willing to puzzle and pause, the words are mostly clear enough, as when our man grumbles, “all i will hiere from thu is scit i saes” meaningfully, waxing most wroth.
One can’t fault Kingsnorth for lack of ambition, though his story stumbles under its own linguistic weight. The reader will judge whether it’s worth the heafodpanneteung.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55597-717-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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