Gothic in tone, epic in ambition, and creepy in spades.
A grievous unhappiness rakes across this novel about the slow self-destruction of the isolated Nowak family.
Wang’s debut begins with a suicidal David Nowak’s reminiscences of his mid-20th-century childhood, which raises ghosts of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, both in style and in the self-flagellating obsessions of a neurotic boy. He spends his Brooklyn youth deep in a self-hatred from which he is occasionally rescued by his fixation on a neighbor girl, the lovely and innocent Marianne. When his father’s sudden death leads to the hapless David’s decision to sell the piano company he has inherited, Marianne abandons him under the pressure of her family’s disdain, and so begins the series of events that becomes the death-seeking spiral that forms this novel. Not yet 20, David aimlessly lets his wealth take him to Taiwan, where he meets a bold bar girl named Jia-Hui Chen, whose “sappy, sloppy girlishness” makes his “nerves squirm with delight.” David and the girl he renames Daisy alternate telling the story of the early years of their marriage, "hemorrhaging money" in California. Daisy’s voice is brash and matter-of-fact, a welcome relief from David’s morose, confessional detailing of his progressive madness. Eventually they hole up in a valley in the Sierras, “a place of brambling woods and mining shafts.” Penned in first by David’s aloofness and then by Daisy’s growing paranoia, the Nowaks’ world shrinks and becomes increasingly eccentric. When their overly obedient teenage son William picks up the narrative, his voice is an exact echo of his father’s. So is his obsessive love for pubescent girls. Wang's deeply uncomfortable and somber novel is soaked with bizarre details, yet only in its final movements does the pace shift from static and entrapping to horrifically propulsive as the distant hope of escape glimmers. More focused on psychology than plot, Wang's novel remains extraordinarily unresolved, with sudden brutalities that send the story haring toward an unexpected, abrupt ending.
Gothic in tone, epic in ambition, and creepy in spades.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939419-69-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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