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 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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