A literary achievement: a complex, character-driven story that’s powerful in concept and execution.
Two brothers set out on Georgia’s mystical Altamaha River, "a long, dark muscle in the earth," to float down to the seacoast, intent on scattering the ashes of their father, "a man of the river….A keeper of it."
Lawton Loggins, a veteran SEAL warrior, and his younger brother, Hunter, a college student, are more similar than different: strong-willed, single-minded, hammered into their father’s iron concept of manhood. Hiram Loggins, their father, was a U.S. Navy Vietnam swift boat sailor. A troubled, complex man who forever "felt the blackness lapping at him, hungry," Hiram took up tidewater fishing, but he was unlucky, twice losing shrimp boats, one while hauling in "square grouper" (marijuana bales dropped by smuggler’s aircraft). Haunting Hiram’s memory was a youthful incident involving a childhood friend. His sons know that friend as Uncle King, an eccentric failed priest–turned–environmental guerilla. Before the trip, the sons, Lawton especially, were skeptical that their father’s death was an accident, but both are stunned when the truth is revealed, giving them knowledge that will redefine their memories and their futures. Expanding the Georgia lowland setting of this family saga is a narrative thread about the 1564 French settlement of Fort Caroline along the river. That struggle is detailed through the eyes of the expedition artist, Le Moyne, a man made real by a nuanced characterization. Contemporary drawings are reproduced. Thoroughly researched and expansively imagined, this portion of the novel is a tale of Utopia raped by greed, ineptness, arrogance, and deadly racism. Amid the deft descriptions of cypress swamps haunted by mythical beasts and poisoned by pollution, Taylor (Fallen Land, 2016) turns French fumbling, Hiram's rage, and the brothers' frustration into a common theme about humankind's struggle to understand its place in nature.
A literary achievement: a complex, character-driven story that’s powerful in concept and execution.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11175-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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