It’s a man’s world and women exist as second-class citizens in this skippable novel.
A narcissistic man is kicked out of the house by his wife after a one-night stand while also having trouble at work; his tentative sister seeks success in her career.
Davis Winger, who's in his mid-30s, is confident that he's a good guy. The kind of guy who helps neighbors move and has sex with his wife of eight years “thrice weekly” without needing to picture “a tangle of tipsy sorority sisters.” Sure, he has sex with a co-worker while on a business trip. But she came on to him and he apologized for the “lapse.” Why can’t his wife understand that she belongs to him? And why is his boss putting him on leave during the investigation of a malfunction on a brand-new amusement-park ride he designed? Unfair! After being kicked out of the house, Davis moves into a nearby apartment complex, where he commences an ongoing physics tutoring/ogling situation with a high school teen. He is derisive of housewives and their “nicotine spots and low-swinging labias [sic]” who dare sit by the pool as he lifeguards to fill his now-empty workdays. Davis’ overt sexism is understood as such by himself and others and yet allowed to stand because, you know, he’s a good guy. Half of Abramowitz's (Thank You, Goodnight, 2015) book revolves around Davis’ younger sister, Molly, 32, and her love life and career trajectory as a soft-news journalist. But don’t worry, she recognizes that her own career opportunities are really due to the much younger man she’s dating. And when she starts dating someone new, her brother grants his permission after making sure the guy hasn’t slept with too many other women. Characters in this book rarely smile, they smirk. The prose is turgid, the story repetitive, the characters clichéd, and juvenile sexual innuendo abounds.
It’s a man’s world and women exist as second-class citizens in this skippable novel.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1465-6
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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