The conflicts here are big—abandonment, grief, race, the unfairness of fate. The healing powers of sisterhood are comforting...
Half sisters Sky and Tara have, at best, a fragile bond. Will it be enough to save them?
Pearlman (The Christmas Cookie Club, 2010, etc.) offers another warm tale of sisters rescuing each other. As children, Sky and Tara had a wary relationship. Sky’s father died when she was seven, and Tara’s father abandoned her. Each jealous of the other—“at least you knew your father” counters “at least your father is alive somewhere”—neither realizes that having each other is enough. That is, not until tragedy strikes. All grown up, Tara has it all. In an interracial relationship with Aaron, her band mate, she has a beloved child, Levy. Their rap band, Special Intent and Li’l Key, is on the road and poised for stardom. She may even have the opportunity to strike out on her own as a solo act. That is, if she is willing to abandon Aaron and accept the rather creepy attentions of King, the music mogul. Sky has it all, too. Married to her childhood sweetheart, Troy, she has a promising job as an attorney. After many miscarriages and stillborn births, Sky and Troy finally have their beloved Rachel. Suddenly, Troy falls ill, and no antibiotics can eradicate the MRSA from his body. Utterly bereft, Sky can barely acknowledge her own daughter, much less her sister. Among the women who swoop in to help her recover are familiar faces from The Christmas Cookie Club: Marnie, Sissy and Allie. The Plan? Send Sky home with Tara’s traveling band. This, of course, gives the sisters time to work out their relationship. And after screaming arguments, the near death of another loved one and finally released prejudices, the two begrudgingly learn to trust, love and respect each other.
The conflicts here are big—abandonment, grief, race, the unfairness of fate. The healing powers of sisterhood are comforting but, in the end, the resolution is too easy.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5949-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
