Readers who prefer fiction that provides much simpler resolutions than life ever does will like Hatvany’s once-over-lightly...
When her severely disabled sister becomes pregnant, Nicole Hunter must confront the family issues she fled 10 years earlier.
Hatvany’s latest (Outside the Lines, 2012, etc.) afflicts her heroine with multiple traumas. First, there’s the unnamed condition that since infancy has rendered Nicole’s younger sister Jenny physically helpless and mute—except for the terrible screaming fits that provoked their father to hit her. His violence was Trauma Number Two; Number Three was the post-violence trips to Jenny’s bedroom at night, which led Nicole to believe their father sexually abused her. Trauma Number Four was the decision to institutionalize Jenny, which prompted Nicole to leave home 10 years earlier; she blames her mother for giving in to her father’s pressure, especially since the marriage ultimately failed anyway. Now, as the novel opens, comes Trauma Number Five: Jenny has been raped by a Wellman Institute employee, and her mother (Jenny’s legal guardian) refuses to consider terminating the pregnancy. Mom is racked with guilt about an abortion she had years earlier, but Nicole’s poorly motivated willingness to go along with this is one of the many moments when plot gears can be heard clanking loudly. We know from the get-go that Nicole has never really settled into life in San Francisco and that the gorgeous workaholic lawyer she lives with doesn’t want to have kids. So when she starts thinking about adopting Jenny’s baby and her hometown best friend introduces her to an exemplary single dad whose young daughter makes an instinctive connection with Jenny, a degree in rocket science isn’t required to see where all this is heading. Hatvany has an easy, readable prose style, and her tender portrait of Nicole’s nonverbal bond with Jenny (the eponymous language of sisters) is touching. But her characters are painted in broad strokes, and even the most wrenching questions get feel-good answers.
Readers who prefer fiction that provides much simpler resolutions than life ever does will like Hatvany’s once-over-lightly approach just fine.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8813-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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 deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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