A stirring fictional account of a remarkable figure that’s occasionally hampered by wooden prose.
Watson chronicles more than 50 years in the extraordinary life of Maggie Lena Walker, the first Black woman to charter an American bank.
When she’s 12, narrator Maggie Mitchell finds her life upended when her father is found floating facedown in the James River in Richmond, Virginia. Forced to grow up fast, Maggie helps her grief-stricken mother in her laundry service and soon begins attending meetings of the Independent Order of St. Luke, a humanitarian group for Black people in the community. Here, Maggie eventually meets and marries Armstead Walker, a man who admires her self-sufficiency, and they go on to have three children. Over the span of five decades, Maggie’s unwavering dedication to improving the lives of Black people is depicted in meticulous detail. Her efforts to expand the Order, eventually taking over its leadership, and her triumphs in establishing both a newspaper and the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank are challenged at every turn. Maggie weathers physical assaults, intimidation by White businessmen, and colorism from her darker-skinned peers, yet she remains dedicated to her causes even amid personal tragedies. Historically minded readers will enjoy the accurate details here; Maggie’s life is anchored around concrete dates that add context. Others may be disappointed by the expositional prose and dialogue. There are conversations between close friends that feel more like public speeches, as do parts of Maggie’s narration: “Negro women, hemmed in and circumscribed with every imaginable obstacle in our way, blocked and held down by the fears and prejudices of whites—ridiculed and sneered at by the intelligent Blacks. Let us all advance.” In addition, the time span means some milestones are given only glancing treatment—Watson shines when conveying Black patrons’ joy at finally having an emporium that caters to their needs, yet the passage is all too fleeting. At the same time, repetition takes up precious space. Armstead’s vacillation between approval and dismay at Maggie’s not being a typical housewife grows tiresome after the umpteenth mention. Still, Watson’s love for Maggie shines through.
A stirring fictional account of a remarkable figure that’s occasionally hampered by wooden prose.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781668003022
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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