That corny ancient curse is an awkward fit with contemporary shenanigans.
An ugly turf war between Maine lobstermen is almost eclipsed by family mythology in this slow-moving second novel from Zentner (Touch, 2011).
Loosewood Island, a disputed territory, straddles the U.S.-Canada border, reflecting the author’s U.S.-Canadian heritage. Since the 18th century, it has been dominated by the Kings family. The first Kings, Brumfitt, was both lobsterman and prolific painter. He claimed in his journal that his wife came from the sea, like a mermaid. She brought a blessing (the sea would provide for them) and a curse (it would claim a son from each generation). Both predictions have been borne out. The current patriarch, Woody, has three daughters (Cordelia, the narrator; Rena; and Carly) and one son, Scotty. Better watch out, kid! Sure enough, when the boy is 9, he’s swept overboard and dies. Soon after, his distraught mother drowns herself. Meanwhile the nearest community, James Harbor, has been poaching their waters. Inspired by a Brumfitt painting, Woody smashes the ringleader’s hand with a hammer, meriting four months in the psych ward. We have to work through a lot of back story before reaching the present. Woody is 57 and having dizzy spells. The no-nonsense Cordelia captains her own boat and is his acknowledged successor. The James Harbor boys are acting up again, adding meth smuggling to their poaching. But even now the story fails to zip along. There are interludes when Cordelia turns docent, as she describes Brumfitt’s paintings, one of which hangs in the Met. Today’s problems (will Cordelia snag her newly divorced sternman? How will her sister’s lesbian partner handle working with Woody?) seem picayune, set against the mythic past. Even the discovery of a mutilated body on a ghost ship lacks a payoff. Toward the end, the ocean grabs yet another family member, and there’s some unconvincing bang-bang as Cordelia confronts the meth smuggler.
That corny ancient curse is an awkward fit with contemporary shenanigans.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08957-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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