An engrossing family tale that balances poignant reflections with 19th-century action.
A historical novel focuses on an Irish immigrant family’s fragile and combustible American dream.
In Flower’s tale, Irish farmer Robert Gillian loses his two youngest children during the blight in Ireland and starts afresh in New York City. A scene depicting his family’s suffering during the Irish famine cuts to his imprisonment in a New York jailhouse in 1869. The book unravels the threads leading up to Gillian’s grim fate, showing the dangerous lengths he goes to as the protector and provider of his family. Gillian becomes a fireman for “White Flag” Engine Company Five, making friends with the recently freed African American Clancy and the Native American Katonah. Gillian’s drunk and complacent foreman, Brian Denny, appears wealthy despite the poor status of the company. Gillian is haunted by a strange figure with a terrifically scarred visage, “a man and bug at once!”—John Mahon. Through Denny and Mahon, Gillian eventually becomes a “fire marker man,” putting down plaques for the Chelsea Surety Company at its insured buildings—while also carrying out more sinister activities for the business. His wife, Aileen, and daughter, Mary, tackle the difficulties of working at an exhausting textile company, while his son, Patrick, fends off bullies and learns to become a druggist. Gillian gets wrapped up in the complexities of arson, firefighting, the Civil War, and individual quests for revenge. A powerful family narrative of tragedy and hope emerges in Flower’s novel along with the age-old American question: How can the exploited pull themselves up from their bootstraps without exploiting others? When Gillian becomes wealthy enough to buy a mirror, he is forced to look at himself and question his own authenticity and moral convictions. Despite occasional obscurities regarding 1800s fire safety systems in the United States, the novel weaves an engaging story with strong characterizations. The book’s absorbing themes—questions of justice and morality in building wealth—are pressingly relevant today.
An engrossing family tale that balances poignant reflections with 19th-century action.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-9867705-0-5
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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