A richly embroidered story of early-20th-century rural life in South Carolina.
A young girl struggles in her relationship with her overbearing stepmother in Alexander’s second historical novel in a series.
In Greeleyville, South Carolina, in 1918, 12-year-old Gaynelle Bell lives a difficult life on her family’s farm. Her stepmom, Jessie, seems bent on making everyone’s days joyless, and her 16-year-old sister, Vivian, hasn’t been herself lately. Gaynelle finds escape in the stables, where she reads books that her father, Clayton, secretly gives to her. Nearly a year ago, the town doctor, Stephen Connor—who may be Vivian’s biological father—offered to pay for the older girl to attend boarding school in Charleston. However, Jessie has been secretly slipping poison into Vivian’s tea to keep her at home. Clayton takes Gaynelle on visits to Aunt Anna, the widowed best friend of the sisters’ late mother. Gaynelle is fascinated by a tapestry in Anna’s house: “It depicted a young woman in a high tower. Impossibly-long, honey-colored hair flowed out the tower window to the ground, where a raven-haired young man in royal garb stood.” When the poisoning—but not the culprit—is discovered and Vivian is sent away to school, Gaynelle is left to fend for herself against her stepmother’s cruelties. She thinks her handsome prince may have arrived in the form of new farmhand Tommy Salters, but Jessie proves a daunting guardian. Alexander’s prose ably replicates the rhythms of speech—and life—in the 1920s South, as when Tommy bids Gaynelle farewell at the end of the harvest: “ ‘Your Pa just don’t need me right now. Leastways, not for a couple o’ months. But he will in the spring. We’ll figure it out.’….Winter had arrived, and they were making their final goodbyes.” The novel does take a while to get going, but once it does, readers will find themselves hooked by the more dramatic elements of this coming-of-age tale. Fans of the previous volume, Silk (2021), about Gaynelle and Vivian’s mother, will likely get more from this sequel than newcomers will, but all are likely to find much to enjoy here.
A richly embroidered story of early-20th-century rural life in South Carolina.Pub Date: April 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-955444-26-2
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Onalex Books
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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