Endearing characters carry a sinuous story of family bonds.
A panoramic novel tracing generations of the Gannon family illuminates the aftershocks of war in the 20th century.
When Michael Gannon, war hero and devout Catholic, husband to Barbara, father to Mike Jr., Luke, Francis, Patty Ann, and soon-to-be Sissy, dies on the front lawn of their yellow house in California, Barbara must learn to manage their lives without him. Predominately following Barbara and Francis, the novel ranges from 1962 to 2015; chapters sometimes jump months, other times decades, to offer snapshots of the family’s progression. Barbara is remarried to Ronnie, a kind and loving but sexually evasive man. To save him from the draft, Patty Ann marries her high school boyfriend, a ne’er-do-well drug dealer, who leaves her with three children. When the situation becomes overwhelming, Barbara and Ronnie become legal guardians to Kennedy, Patty Ann’s eldest son, and care for him even after her third marriage reinstates some stability. After the horrors of losing his father and then his lifelong best friend, Eugene, who killed himself, Francis is relentlessly on the run. But a transformative experience on a boat halfway between Ireland and Scotland leads him to write a hit song and retire, with his fragile wife, to a maple syrup farm in the hills between Massachusetts and Vermont. Characters are occasionally lost in the expanse—Patty Ann’s other children are merely mentioned; we learn in passing that after a military stint, Mike Jr. ends up a doctor in Texas; Sissy has disappeared to Africa. Most important to Korkeakivi (An Unexpected Guest, 2012), it seems, is to communicate the damage war causes, not just physically and not just to soldiers, but emotionally and to families and communities everywhere. This damage underpins the novel; Luke is killed training for Vietnam, and the men who do return from battle do so with injuries that ultimately kill them—Michael’s weakened heart, Eugene’s psychological trauma. Everything works out a little too beautifully—despite the war-induced deaths—tipping the novel somewhat toward the maudlin, its moral toward platitudinous: “The thing about life is it is so damned confusing. Such a web, each piece of it dependent on something else, something that can be as tiny as a smile from a stranger or as huge as heart disease. The good all tangled up with the bad.” Even so, the effortless prose and vining plot make for a winsome tale of kinship and growth.
Endearing characters carry a sinuous story of family bonds.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-30784-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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