A rambunctious and well-researched but ungainly historical romance.
A ventriloquist and actress pursue a rough-and-tumble romance in the shadow of the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair.
Readers meet Ferret Skerritt, narrator of the second novel by Schaffert (Creative Writing and Literature/Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln; The Coffins of Little Hope, 2011), as he accidentally crashes a hot air balloon into the home of two aging sisters. Ferret was heartbroken when he took flight and wounded after landing, but Schaffert plays up the absurdity of the incident in this entertaining if light novel. Flash back a few months earlier: We meet Ferrett as a one-time petty thief who’s getting by as a ventriloquist at a vaudeville theater, where he meets (and promptly falls for) Cecily, an actress with an obscure history. Omaha’s World’s Fair is depicted as a downscale cousin to Chicago’s lavish 1893 exposition, but there’s still money to be made, and the couple perform on the midway daily (she’s Marie Antoinette, her head chopped off over and over daily) before meeting in the swan-shaped gondola of the title. Ferrett wants to get serious with Cecily, who has an infant daughter (the father is absent), but enter William Wakefield, a wealthy fair organizer who wants Cecily for himself. Schaffert captures the grandeur and strangeness of the fair pavilions, as well as the political ferment of the time. (President William McKinley, in the thick of the Spanish-American War, has a cameo.) Despite the novel’s widescreen setting, though, the central love story is thin and upended so quickly the reader is challenged to feel invested in Ferrett’s and Cecily’s fates. And though Schaffert uses fakery as an intriguing theme (ventriloquists, automatons, Spanish-American War propaganda), the closing chapters’ would-be ghost story has too much stage makeup to achieve its intended Oz-like effect.
A rambunctious and well-researched but ungainly historical romance.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59448-609-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
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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