Damaged parent, damaged child, but Hall’s writing is not urgent or focused enough to make us care about their fates.
From this American author and longtime London resident, a second novel (Deliria, 1994) about the crack-up of an Irish trucker and his daughter.
Bobby Pickering, a Catholic from a Protestant town in Northern Ireland, started to “go dark,” or experience depression, after his beloved mother died of cancer. He moved to London to play bass guitar with an easy-listening band. In 1985, he met Rosalie, an art student from California. Bobby was a sweet but utterly passive guy, whom Rosalie seduced and then, after becoming pregnant, insisted on marrying; yet she had no interest in her baby, Josephine, and returned stateside, leaving Bobby to raise her while driving his newly acquired truck. All this is flashback. The story opens in 1998, when Jo is 12; she has no friends and seldom attends school, accompanying Bobby on his long-distance rides. They stop for a hitchhiker, an up-and-coming American country singer/songwriter, Cosima Stewart (her lyrics punctuate the novel), and Jo becomes a groupie of Cosima and her band. A crisis occurs at the novel’s midpoint, five years later. Jo, having wormed her way into the band’s favor, has had drug-fueled sex with band member Rick, Cosima’s boyfriend. Relishing her new status (ex-virgin!), she flirts with passengers on a ferry ride to Ireland and is horrible to Bobby, who feels rejected and jumps overboard. The story now speeds up (no more flashbacks) while becoming increasingly implausible. In denial about her father’s suicide, Jo starts stalking Cosima, even following her to California. Hall is less interested in examining Jo’s possibly shattered though seemingly robust psyche than in sketching a contemporary Wild West, letting the clichés about guns rain down. After a violent confrontation with Cosima, Jo is sent to a nuthouse before being sheltered by her mother Rosalie (now an upright observant Jew) and eventually returning to England.
Damaged parent, damaged child, but Hall’s writing is not urgent or focused enough to make us care about their fates.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-35944-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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