The profusion of narrative threads and historical detail doesn’t quite add up to a well-told story.
A novel about family, communication, and colonialism in a rarely discussed sphere of World War II conflict.
On March 13, 1942, the Durants—Claire, an aspiring anthropologist, and Shep, a British civil surgeon—rush to prepare their exit from Port Blair, a British penal colony on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, now under threat from Japanese forces. Claire and Shep pack up her field journals, arrowheads, and shell bowls collected from the native Biya and his medically useful plant specimens from their expeditions into the forest over the past five years. But the one thing they can’t locate is their 4-year-old son, Ty. Mute since birth, Ty’s strongest bond is with his Indian caretaker, Naila, a 13-year-old girl who understands his silent capriciousness better than his own mother. Shep, desperate to get his wife to stay on the ship to Calcutta and safety, drugs her and stays behind on the island to look for their son. He finds Ty almost immediately—he and Naila were napping in a banyan grove—but the family’s separation decisively changes the course of each of its members’ lives. As one of the few remaining British officials on the island, Shep is locked up by Japanese troops, but not before he sends Ty off into the forest with Naila and Leyo, a Biya family friend, to hide with the tribe. Claire, meanwhile, joins the war effort as a codebreaker, devising a code based on the Biya language for a mission that might just allow her to reunite her family. The plot is rollicking in précis but much less gripping in execution, bogged down by an unmanageable amount of detail, the result of Liu’s (editor: Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives, 2011, etc.) obviously meticulous research: “Claire gets to work making her final tests of the TBX-8 transceiver pack, which will be her primary responsibility, and the SCR-536 mobile Handie-talkie that Ward will use for voice communication back to the TBX.” At every turn, it seems, there’s another islander or British government employee whose backstory is meant to lend emotional heft to the novel. The result is a book that feels scattershot—even the most theoretically wrenching moments don’t quite land, and the reader comes away oddly unmoved by the entire cast.
The profusion of narrative threads and historical detail doesn’t quite add up to a well-told story.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59709-889-2
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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