An engrossing segregation tale that offers a new look at racist violence.
A group of African Americans unites for self-defense in the Jim Crow South in this debut historical novel.
World War II is the recent past in 1950s North Carolina. But for the black former Marines who settled in the town of Centerville after leaving the military, they are under siege there as much as they were on the battlefield. A corrupt white sheriff persecutes the black community, abetted and supported by many of Centerville’s whites. After the local bank rejects his loan application, Micah Boida, “a professor at the Negro college and the owner of the only decent restaurant and lounge for coloreds in the area,” reaches out to friends and acquaintances, urging them to organize for protection and to fight against racism and violence. Micah begins with his fellow male military veterans, but the group, named The Plow, grows to include civilians and women as well. Their first operation, the rescue of a family kidnapped in an attempt to steal its land, is a victory, not least because they are able to keep their work secret. Bruce Johnson, a sheriff's deputy and Micah’s longtime friend, is The Plow’s staunchest white ally, although his willingness to cover up the group’s crimes makes him morally questionable as well. The Plow ultimately tries to take down the biggest threat to Centerville’s African American community, seeking to bring a measure of peace to a dangerous part of the world. While the book’s principal villains border on cartoonish—though their actions are almost entirely historically plausible— Houston does an excellent job of portraying the less violent forms of racism that weigh down the black characters. (“White men have careers, boy. You have a job, and you have a damn good one,” says a water plant foreman to a black employee.) The story also deftly explores community development and personal agency, as the members of The Plow expand their skills and decide to fight on their own behalf. The prose could use polishing in some areas, but the plot is generally strong and fast-paced, making for a highly readable novel that brings the touch of a thriller to its historical elements.
An engrossing segregation tale that offers a new look at racist violence.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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