This uneven but promising debut tells a family fable that rides on its well-developed protagonists.
Two Brooklyn sisters are raised on the Anansi stories and then realize their parents lived them.
Sasha and Zora Porter are growing up in Brooklyn at the turn of the millennium. They exchange HitClip cartridges and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But their main cultural touchstones are the Afro-Caribbean folkstories their parents have raised them on. Their Jamaican father, a failed writer and abusive husband named Nigel, claims he once slayed a spirit called the Rolling Calf with just a penknife. Their Trinidadian mother, the titular Beatrice, recites the Anansi stories with her own interpretations: Anansi, in Beatrice’s telling, is a woman. The family is pulled apart as each member must walk their own path. Sasha explores her attraction to girls and starts to bind her chest; Zora struggles to make good on the literary promise suggested by her first name; Nigel starts a new family with a White woman; and, finally and heartbreakingly, Beatrice develops brain cancer and goes back to Trinidad to be with her Shango healer grandmother. Their story is told from different points of view: Some chapters are matter-of-fact diary entries, while others take on the dramatic tone of fables. Then, thrillingly, Palmer collapses that distance. Nigel really did face down the Rolling Calf, but the truth isn't as heroic as he would like it to be. Palmer is playful as a stylist without undermining her themes of family, identity, and belonging. However, not all of the book’s sections are equally strong, and Palmer sometimes struggles with dialogue. Nigel’s attempts to speak “White,” for example, are often played for comedy (“Their coconut lattes are out of this world”) but can sometimes make him sound like an AI chatbot. Yet when the family breaks bread at the novel's end, it's clear that Palmer has threaded her narrative web successfully, using a cast of unique characters as her spider's silk.
This uneven but promising debut tells a family fable that rides on its well-developed protagonists.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781646220953
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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