On every page we’re reminded of the paradox of how mysterious, thorny, and delicate family relationships can be.
Maksik firmly creates the “place” as the Pacific Northwest, though his characters have a difficult time finding any kind of “shelter”—from place or from each other.
After graduating from an undemanding college, Joe March finds himself a bit lost. He works part time as a bartender and meets Tess Wolff, a free-spirited young woman with something of a wild streak. Besides developing a relationship with Tess, two things haunt Joe’s life. First, he starts to feel the beginnings of bipolar disorder, a disease he characterizes with the metaphors of “tar” and “a bird” whose talons grip him fiercely. Second, Joe’s mother, Anne-Marie, witnesses an act of bullying in a grocery store parking lot, and she takes action by seizing a framing hammer and killing the perpetrator of the violence. (Her defense is weakened by the fact that she delivers seven blows with the hammer, which suggests the level of her rage.) She’s tried, found guilty, and given five-to-25 years. Maksik offers up all of this plot in a chronologically convoluted narrative, moving back and forth to various fragments of his characters’ complicated histories. This strategy serves the narrative well, for it emphasizes the recurring significance of family ties and obligations. After an initial separation, Tess eventually finds Joe and visits Anne-Marie in prison. Along with a number of other women, Tess finds herself admiring Anne-Marie for taking a definitive stand against domestic violence, and she persuades Joe and Seymour, a bouncer at a local bar as well as a prison guard, to get involved in a wacko plot to take revenge on a local college professor who’s physically abusing his wife.
On every page we’re reminded of the paradox of how mysterious, thorny, and delicate family relationships can be.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60945-364-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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BOOK REVIEW
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