An entertaining coming-of-age tale that earns its operatic tone.
A young man endures hardship, abuse and mutilation on the path to musical glory in 18th- century Vienna.
When we first meet Moses, the hero and narrator of Harvell’s debut, he’s growing up in degraded circumstances in the Swiss Alps. His mother is a deaf-mute who is taken advantage of by a local priest, banishing both mother and child to the church belfry in the name of secrecy. She takes her revenge by aggressively pounding the church’s massive bells loudly enough to blast the eardrums of all who approach—except Moses, who has a preternatural musical talent. Cast out by the priest, Moses is soon discovered by two monks, Nicolai and Remus, who exchange Abbott and Costello–style banter as they take the boy under their wing. Moses’ singing ability keeps him from being sent to an orphanage, but the abbey is full of its own humiliations: He’s ostracized by his fellow choirboys, the sons of wealthy men who are financing a massive church construction; Nicolai and Remus are expelled under accusations of homosexuality; and as Moses nears puberty he’s castrated in the hopes of making him a musico. The sole bright spot in his life is Amalia, a young woman seduced by his singing and eager to escape the clutches of her controlling aunt. Harvell’s storytelling is fast-paced and deliberately melodramatic, as the plot threads converge on Vienna, where the debut of Gluck’s Orfeo serves as the novel’s climax. Like Orfeo, the plot of this novel is built on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, though Harvell gives his story a few contemporary twists. Nicolai and Remus provide an opportunity to comment on the struggles of homosexuals at the time, both inside and outside the church; Amalia reveals a proto-feminist eagerness to stop living under the thumb of parents or a husband; and in rounding out this motley crew, Moses himself undercuts the era’s conservative notions of faith and masculinity. Harvell doesn’t press those points, but they do add gravitas to his likable historical page-turner.
An entertaining coming-of-age tale that earns its operatic tone.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-59052-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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