A revelatory novel that offers an evocative account of the lives of Appalachian working women.
A young woman in Appalachia battles poverty, discrimination and her own insecurity in this moving and memorable third novel from Gilmore (Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, 2008, etc.).
In 1974, when Emmalee Bullard gets a job sewing collars at the Tennewa shirt factory, the 16-year-old begins the escape from the miserable poverty in which she was raised. After her mother died years ago, her care fell to her father, Nolan, a handsome, angry drunkard who barely kept her fed or clothed (her schoolteacher took to bathing her in the janitor’s closet). At Tennewa, she is seated next to Leona, a secretive woman, broken from the death of her baby boy years ago. Childless, Leona and Curtis still live in the starter trailer they bought as newlyweds; she takes in extra sewing, and he devotes his life to their church. Leona is hard, but she is the closest thing Emmalee has had to mothering care in years, and so, when, three years later, Emmalee has a baby she calls Kelly Faye, Leona invites them to live at the trailer. Tragedy strikes the day before they’re to move in: Curtis and Leona are killed in a car accident. The funeral director allows Emmalee to sew Leona’s burying dress, so she drops Kelly Faye off at her uncle’s (his childless wife can’t wait to get her hands on the baby) and goes to the trailer to work on Leona’s dress. There, she sees the room Leona prepared: a bed and a crib, baby toys and books, small sweet clothes Leona sewed herself. Heartbroken, Emmalee sews the dress out of red damask and then becomes ill. When she goes to retrieve Kelly Faye, her uncle refuses to give her back, claiming the baby would be better off with them and all they can offer. Shunned by the community, Emmalee’s not sure she’s fit to be a mother, but then a surprising thing happens—the women of Tennewa begin to stand behind her.
A revelatory novel that offers an evocative account of the lives of Appalachian working women.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-88621-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
© 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.
