A genre-busting tale rife with ghosts, history, and music, at once lyrical and street-wise.
A New Jersey man reckons with his family’s history during the Cuban revolution with the help of a needy and persistent ghost.
Ramón’s day-to-day life is pretty simple: work (he’s a security guard at a hospital), play (he’s a popular party DJ), and romance (he’s in a relationship, if a shaky one, with a co-worker). His Cuban heritage is of only passing interest to him, in part because the family lore is so obscure. Did one aunt really kill herself when Castro took power? Did another really escape? Marisol, one of those aunts, isn’t clear on the details herself; and, being dead, her sole investigative option is to haunt Ramón’s dreams and prompt him to do the legwork. This ingenious setup by fantasy and YA pro Older (Freedom Fire, 2019, etc.) gives the narrative an eerie vibe while still taking its history seriously and wraps a tangible story around the notion that history haunts us. A subplot that puts Ramón under threat from an expat Cuban underworld chief further stresses the point and makes the story more than a genealogy exercise. Ramón’s travels reconnect him with family and ultimately deliver him to Cuba in a fine sequence that clears up some of his and Marisol’s inquiries while introducing him to a country that’s actively oppressive when not merely bureaucratic. (The trip also introduces him to Havana’s furtive but defiant gay subculture.) Older trusts the reader won’t closely scrutinize what Marisol can and can’t do as a ghost, and the plotting is rough-hewn. But its voice is solid: Older's narrative smoothly alternates between Ramon’s macho demeanor and Marisol’s more gentle and pleading voice; from America’s hard-nosed culture to Cuba’s more worn-down one; and from ghost story to literary family saga.
A genre-busting tale rife with ghosts, history, and music, at once lyrical and street-wise.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18581-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Imprint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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