A moving, lyrical saga from a time so distant, yet so near.
Morgan (Brave Enemies, 2003, etc.) returns to western North Carolina and the Richards family saga.
Deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, along the Green River, under Mt. Cicero, Hank and Julie Richards move their family from Gap Creek to a small, hardscrabble farm. There, they endure the Great Depression and World War II, stoically facing death and disease, hope and triumph. It’s Annie, their younger daughter, who narrates, harking back to the family’s trek from Gap Creek to Green River, road "froze as stiff as chalk," and ending her story as a grown woman birthing a daughter, realizing "having your own baby makes you feel connected...taking part in the future and with the people that come before you." Recreating the rural mountain South not yet 100 years past, Annie tells of Old Pat, a purebred German shepherd given to her brother, Troy, as payment for summer work. She offers stories of Muir and Moody Powell, twins from a nearby farm, one ambitious to preach, the other preferring to gamble and run moonshine. She remembers tramps and hobos, Julie offering at least fresh milk and cornbread even if cupboards were bare. The novel begins in 1943 with Troy’s death, a casualty in a bomber crash in England. Julie’s shattered, and she "sealed up her thoughts and grief inside her and she wouldn’t let any of us touch it." But even the dead live in the soulful narrative. Troy, gentle, artistic, is home on leave and must put down Old Pat after she’s horribly maimed by a firecracker. A tortured misfit stands in church to claim Troy’s death is God’s retribution, and the family sits silently. A troubled veteran, the new husband of Troy’s former fiancee, drags her away from Troy’s post-war burial at gunpoint. Morgan pens an eloquent story of stoicism and pain, endurance and courage, ending, as all life will, with death and birth.
A moving, lyrical saga from a time so distant, yet so near.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61620-161-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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