Pitch-perfect voices tell a story loaded with lyric suffering and redemption—bound to be a huge hit.
Greene’s debut shows three generations of an eastern Tennessee family struggling against abusive men and narrow middle-class values that try to destroy their unusually active spirits.
In the 1960s, Byrdie raises her granddaughter Myra on Bloodroot Mountain. She can tell early on that Myra has “the touch,” an extra sensitivity passed down by the women of their family, though it skipped Byrdie. Myra’s grandmother is especially devoted to her because all of Birdie’s children died young, including Myra’s mother Clio, whose car was hit by a train while she was out hell-raising with Myra’s dad. The narration of Part One alternates between Birdie and Myra’s boyhood friend Doug, who loves the wild girl but knows she’ll never be his. Then puberty hits. Poor Doug, the novel’s most endearing, least tortured character, disappears from the book after Myra is swept up in a passionate romance with John Odom, whose father owns a local hardware store in the valley. John’s family is as “touched” in its way as Myra’s. Desire turns into violent possessiveness. Greene manipulates her narrative at this point so that Myra’s return to the mountain to raise twins Laura and Johnny without her husband goes unexplained. The twins’ accounts alternate in Part Two; Myra and then John narrate the novel’s final 100 pages. This fractured chronology builds suspense, allowing for red herrings and portentous foreshadowing like Myra’s box holding a ring with a man’s finger still attached. When their mother is placed in an insane asylum, the twins are sent to foster care. Laura marries, but her husband drowns, and his mother takes away their baby. Brilliant but troubled Johnny burns down the Odoms’ hardware store and seems headed for a bad end until he meets the mysterious Ford Hendrix, a reclusive Pulitzer Prize winner who once knew Myra and is missing a finger or two.
Pitch-perfect voices tell a story loaded with lyric suffering and redemption—bound to be a huge hit.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26986-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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