Beautifully drawn and emotionally resonant, this book unfortunately stumbles over its unrealized characters.
Long ago the Guardians protected the Chukchi people of Siberia. These beautiful dogs became the locus for their community and culture. But that was long ago.
Thalasinos’ debut novel toggles between the stories of Jeaantaa and Rosalie, set nearly a century apart. Jeaantaa’s story begins in 1919 Siberia and is framed against the impending invasion of Stalin’s Red Army, which ultimately displaces her Chukchi people and destroys much of their culture. Rosalie’s story, set in Wisconsin, concerns the cultural effects of displacement. Both young women have endured heartbreak as Jeaantaa’s childhood sweetheart dies the day they are affianced, and Rosalie’s husband belittles and abuses her. Both are estranged from their communities, with Jeaantaa blamed for her beloved’s death and Rosalie too shy to fit in. When Rosalie sees a maltreated husky at the local junkyard, however, her immediate bond with the animal establishes a link across time. Rosalie begins to fall into reveries, dreaming of a woman in a skin dress and boots, standing on the sea ice, hair waving in the screaming wind and mourning the loss of so much, so many. Haunted by Jeaantaa, Rosalie gains the courage to rescue the husky, which enrages her husband but releases in Rosalie a passion she had never suspected. Soon, Jan and Dave hire Rosalie as a dog handler for their dog sled—racing kennel, and Rosalie’s talents are abundantly evident. Just as Jeaantaa served as the Keeper of the Guardians, so does Rosalie seem to become a modern-day husky whisperer. Thalasino’s evocations of Siberian and Wisconsin seascapes and landscapes are deft and richly embroidered. Her characters hold tantalizing potential (particularly the troubled and secretive Dan Villieux), yet even the connection between Jeaantaa and Rosalie remains oddly forced rather than fated.
Beautifully drawn and emotionally resonant, this book unfortunately stumbles over its unrealized characters.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3036-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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 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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