Though the prose is dense, this invitingly odd narrative keeps building intrigue.
Steele’s surreal historical novel chronicles weird happening in a settlement in 16th-century America.
Penelope Turner and Alaster Harper are young people who have sailed from England to the New World (in the novel’s conceit, the bulk of the text comes from their respective journals). Alaster’s father is a secular humanist and Penelope’s father is a preacher. They are part of a group of settlers that has taken a nuanced approach to creating a colony; while the community is prone to the usual squabbles, the members get along remarkably well, even as some prove to be religious while others are logic-loving skeptics. One day, a strange woman and boy appear who are unlike anyone they have encountered. They are greenish in color; the boy dies, and the woman lives. The woman belongs to no native group, yet she has no knowledge of Europe; she eventually attains a normal skin color, but her origins remain mysterious. She is called Agnes. The arrival of Agnes is merely the beginning of the utterly bizarre events to come, which include the appearance of mysterious metal sculptures and a cathedral. The entries from Penelope and Alaster’s journals are written in a manner meant to evoke a bygone mode of expression; Alaster writes that one of the sculptures seems to represent “a great nautilus, with diaphanous waters fanned and smoothly spilling from the greatest aspect of its spiral, then caught by the limpid pool at its base.” This stylized prose makes the long novel (it’s over 800 pages) feel even longer. Still, such passages can be intriguing—when strange things start to happen, they build a palpable sense of mystery. (Who actually is Agnes? How do strange things keep appearing?) With the addition of some engaging interpersonal strife, like Penelope’s longing for Alaster, there is always reason to keep turning the pages.
Though the prose is dense, this invitingly odd narrative keeps building intrigue.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9798335227117
Page Count: 403
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
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 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
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