Rather sloppy, but Thomas fans may embrace this latest effort.
British author Thomas (The Illusionists, 2014, etc.) brings back the Wix family, entertainers who own London’s Palmyra theater, and focuses on the daughter’s story in this historical romance set in the early 20th century and beyond.
Since surviving the sinking of a pleasure steamer during a family excursion, psychically gifted 13-year-old Nancy Wix occasionally sees images of a young victim. Worse, rescued passenger Lawrence Feather pops up at random times, intent on convincing Nancy to channel her powers and communicate with his beloved sister, a passenger who drowned on the cruise. Nancy’s repelled by him and uncomfortable that he recognizes her connection with the Uncanny (as she calls the supernatural world), something she’s never revealed to her parents. Her mother, Eliza, is frail, and her father, Devil, is always busy scheming to keep the Palmyra afloat. Her parents’ relationship is stormy, but the two remain devoted to one another; Nancy, though, often feels alienated from both. They focus their efforts on younger brother Arthur’s future by enrolling him in elite schools and encouraging him to mingle with the upper class. Nancy knows her parents have no such hopes for her eldest brother, Cornelius, or herself, but she’s determined to follow her own path. In her 20s, she becomes involved with Feather's godson, Lion, but abandons conventional expectations to be with the love of her life, wealthy businessman Gil Maitland. Nancy also finds herself slipping into the role of parent while her mother and father become mired in destructive behaviors. To help keep her family afloat, she seeks out Feather—who uses his own weak psychic abilities and knowledge of human gullibility to conduct séances for paying audiences—becomes his student and protégé, and then leaves him to establish her own show at the Palmyra. Thomas focuses more on plot development and characterization in her current offering than she did in the prequel, and she almost manages to pull off an absorbing historical romance. She creates a dynamic protagonist involved in an uncertain romance, and her other principal characters are equally well-rounded. But her heavily ornate style of writing, combined with long superfluous passages and terminology unfamiliar to many readers, detracts from the overall quality of the story.
Rather sloppy, but Thomas fans may embrace this latest effort.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1174-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 14, 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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