Carefully composed, heartbreakingly poignant, and memorable.
Raebeck’s coming-of-age novel follows a teenage boy through family tragedy and social conflict in 1980s Long Island.
“My mother died in May 1982, the end of my sophomore year in high school…” Ricky Hawkins tells us in the opening lines of this melancholy novel. Her death is the catalyst for the gradual dissolution of an already fragile family. Ricky’s father, Harold, moves the family back to their summer house in Amagansett, a narrow strip of land between bay and ocean on Long Island’s East End. It was their original home, where Ricky and his older sister, Lonnie, and younger sister, Tessy, were raised until his father’s job took the family up-island. Too quickly, Harold brings a new woman into the siblings’ lives. Lonnie rebels and runs off to Florida with her boyfriend, the fretful and anxious Tessy turns inward, and Ricky finds escape on the pickup basketball court behind the Amagansett grade school. This is where Ricky, who is White, becomes friends with Lance Williams, the Black star of the East Hampton high school basketball team. It is a relationship that will bring him into the middle of the tensions between the local Whites and Blacks. The narrative ambles at a gentle pace, leading to a moment of searing high drama. The author captures the particulars of time and place through evocative prose and succinct dialogue that reveals much in few words (“One of the first warm days, the sky a mild blue with huge puffs of cloud, I found Tessy leaning on one hand, pulling weeds with the other, one knee poking her white dress into a small tent”). As Ricky rides his bike from hamlet to hamlet, the author treats readers to beautifully expansive vistas that will change dramatically in the coming years (Amagansett still has its potato fields, and the large, elite chain stores have not yet invaded East Hampton’s Main Street). Through Ricky’s friendship with a group of local fishermen, the reader bears witness to the imminent demise of that industry and to the desperation and resignation among those who called the East End home.
Carefully composed, heartbreakingly poignant, and memorable.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781662936821
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
