Whether or not they think of themselves as bookish, readers of all stripes will enjoy cycling through these characters’...
A mother and a daughter seek balance in their broken lives while books provide them with comfort, clarity, and clues to a mystery.
When Ava North joins her best friend’s long-running book club in Providence, Rhode Island, it is not to find solace from the long-ago deaths of her little sister and mother. That wound is locked up tight. Instead, it's because her husband of 25 years has left her for another woman, and Ava is bitter and lonely. So much so that she's a refreshingly cranky, reticent participant in the club, whose theme for the year is “The Book That Matters Most” to each member. It's somewhat suspect, but forgivable, that all the members save Ava choose well-regarded classics, but Hood (An Italian Wife, 2014, etc.) handles it with a light touch. Meanwhile, Ava’s problem child, Maggie, continues running with the wrong crowd when she abandons her study-abroad semester in Italy to haunt Paris, where she slips willingly into heroin addiction. There is momentum in the juxtaposition of Ava's and Maggie’s circumstances, one improving incrementally, one devolving steadily, into which the spice of intrigue is added: what were the circumstances of Ava’s sister’s death? What of her mother’s? Why is Maggie the way she is? And what does Ava’s little-known book pick—the book that matters most to her—have to do with all of it? Hood occasionally adds a slurry of unnecessary exposition but is more often able to limn fundamental character truths via well-placed details. She has a knack for dramatic revelation that feels natural, possibly because she is so skilled at knowing what to leave out.
Whether or not they think of themselves as bookish, readers of all stripes will enjoy cycling through these characters’ lives and discovering their shared, mysterious past.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24165-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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