A wild first novel that amply confirms the promise of Puchner’s story collection, Music Through the Floor (2005).
Family love flickers capriciously throughout this fine domestic drama, which runs the gamut from hilarious to harrowing.
Developer Warren Ziller’s first big mistake was to uproot his family from their happy Wisconsin home and move them to a too-expensive house in a lush Los Angeles suburb. He’s been told he can make a killing in California real estate, so he rushes to build in the desert without knowing about a planned sludge dump—his second big mistake. In the summer of 1985, facing bankruptcy, he hasn’t sold a single property. His sweetly virtuous wife Camille makes educational videos; handsome oldest son Dustin surfs and leads a punk band; daughter Lyle is smart and misanthropic; 11-year-old Jonas is strange and lonely. All of them are oblivious to their impending doom as they perform “the slow, jokey, unrehearsed vaudeville of being a Ziller.” Vaudeville is right: There are many laugh-out-loud moments, among them a particularly hilarious scene in which Lyle, drunk on tequila, serves some outraged customers at an ice-cream parlor. More serious developments include Lyle gleefully losing her virginity to the Mexican gatekeeper on their estate and Dustin having bravado sex with the disturbed sister of his less seducible girlfriend. Everything changes at the midpoint, when a gas explosion destroys their home and Dustin is badly burned. Family solidarity reigns supreme during the Zillers’ two-month vigil at the hospital, but it’s a different story when, with painful irony, they find themselves living next to the sludge dump. Another crisis erupts when Jonas runs away, but even in these dark times, humor keeps bubbling up. The inventive author maintains a swirl of action while encouraging us to ponder some fundamentals. What holds a family together: memories, rituals, crises? And how do parents guard against favoring one child over another?
A wild first novel that amply confirms the promise of Puchner’s story collection, Music Through the Floor (2005).Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7048-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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