Although the plot reads like a soap opera, De Witt’s prose is nuanced and her characters are finely shaded.
A story about growing up with a distant father and an ineffectual mother in Austin, Texas, in the 1970s and '80s.
Molly Moore’s father is a Circuit Court judge, intellectually prepossessing but emotionally reserved. De Witt’s narrative begins with his death and then gives us flashbacks into Molly’s growing up, moving away and their eventual reconciliation. As a young girl Molly never quite fits in, in part because, like her father, she’s extremely smart—though not as brilliant as her best friend Becky Lopez. Molly and Becky manage to negotiate their adolescence in the usual painful ways, with crushes on boys, negative body images and unanswerable questions about their future. As a tween Molly becomes enamored with Keith Miller, but like many pubescent romances, this one fades—though she’s still hurt when Keith makes Becky pregnant their senior year of high school. Molly goes on to Harvard, while Becky decides to give birth to her baby, a daughter she names Kate. While at Harvard Molly sleeps around, anywhere from one-night stands to a more enduring, and heartbreaking, relationship with Joe Price, a charming liar who’s never been to college. In her sophomore year Molly gets pregnant, has an abortion, leaves Joe (by mutual consent) and drops out of Harvard, becoming—rather unconvincingly—a cleaning woman for Cambridge society women. This she does for 14 years, sleeping “with more men than [she] can remember,” until she discovers she’s once again pregnant. This time she decides to keep the child, whom she names Zim. Then, under a cloud of scandal, Molly discovers that her father had allegedly tried to help Becky’s daughter Kate, who’s become a street kid and part-time prostitute. When Kate is killed in a wreck while Judge Moore is driving, it becomes clear that his interest in her was more than paternal. Molly finally, and painfully, reconciles with her father, now dying of cancer.
Although the plot reads like a soap opera, De Witt’s prose is nuanced and her characters are finely shaded.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9826171-4-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Lorimer Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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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