Award-winning musician/composer Lazar’s debut novel presents the tale of Nelson, half-beagle, half-poodle, and thoroughly lost.
Nelson is a mistake. An amorous beagle exploits a fence hole, and a sweet woman who breeds beagles and poodles ends up with mutts to sell. Nelson is sent to a Boston pet shop, where he attracts the attention of Katey and Don Entwhistle on their way home after honeymooning in Italy. Katey is enthralled with Nelson’s personality and odd coloring around his eyes. She takes him home to New York. Life is good. Nelson is treasured and pampered, but Katey’s travels as a concert pianist and Don’s loss of his professorship trouble their marriage. There’s an affair. There are arguments. One day stressed-out Don forgets to latch the backyard gate, and Nelson follows his nose into a life of adventure. The book becomes a long tale of lost-and-found, unfolding from Nelson’s perspective. Lazar focuses on all things dog, particularly the smells, a dog’s window to the world. As Nelson wanders, truck driver Thatcher Stevens uses a hamburger to lure him away from scavenging at a landfill. Later Stevens is injured and hospitalized. Nelson panics and escapes his truck cab. He meets another stray, Lucy. There are coyotes and wolves, and an old man to save, a leg amputation and escapes from shelters and euthanization. Nelson ends up in California, forever remembering his “Great Love,” Katey. Lazar’s straightforward language suits the canine narrative, and he writes agreeably enough from a dog’s point of view. The author’s interpretation of wolfpack dynamics is also interesting. But Lazar may have moved the book off the young adult shelf by allowing Nelson to observe more than one steamy scene— “clumsy love…the whole cab would shake back and forth…dislodged again by sweaty human bodies on top of him.”
Not a Disney-esque Homeward Bound homage, but rather something of a canine version of Black Beauty.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3290-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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