A lurid, improbable, but rousing saga of a love that dared not yet speak its name.
Secret lesbians battle monstrous bigotry in 19th-century Florida in this rambunctious historical melodrama.
Peters’ (One Little World, 2016, etc.) sixth Mary Fisher novel finds the protagonist and her lover, Abigail Greene, taking a breather from trauma in the seaside town of Loggerhead, Florida. Abigail recently lost her hand in an alligator mauling, and Mary has weathered sadistic psychiatric treatments for homosexuality. It’s 1896, so they’re definitely not open about their relationship, but the tall, raw-boned, close-cropped Mary easily passes as the petite, green-eyed Abigail’s husband. They settle in for a happy sojourn, basking in the warm accommodations and marvelous indoor plumbing at the local boardinghouse and dining on oysters; there’s even an exciting diversion when they chase down a jewel thief. But deeper shadows emerge in Loggerhead after Mary and Abigail intervene to stop a mob from lynching a falsely accused African-American man. They soon confront a conspiracy that involves bank robbery, child molestation, and an underground movement to install a fascist neo-Confederate regime in the statehouse. As the plot turns dark and gory, Mary unleashes her meditative sixth sense and her mighty left hand, which has a mind of its own that’s constantly yearning for violence. Peters steeps this yarn in period detail that’s not spoiled too much by her characters’ anachronistic tendency to cuss like cable-TV thugs. (Mary’s thick Scottish dialect, though, is a bit harder to take.) The story sometimes feels clichéd; bad and good guys are forever turning and re-turning the tables on one another after interludes of trash talk. However, the narrative moves along briskly, and the scenes are well-staged when jawing turns to fighting. Mary makes for an intriguing heroine: naïve, awkward, mannish, yet entranced by the more assertive Abigail. Despite lyrical lesbian love scenes, though, Mary’s greatest passion is for mayhem: “Something came over me as the life bled out of him, and like some sort of madwoman I began to shriek and scream out in some twisted ejaculation of joy as I rode atop his flailing body.” Readers will find themselves rooting for this Valkyrie as she mounts up for battle.
A lurid, improbable, but rousing saga of a love that dared not yet speak its name.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5169-9496-0
Page Count: 342
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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