A richly comic, tender evocation of Ireland's dwindling, splendid Anglo-Irish. Motherless since eight, Molly Hassard, our fresh and delightful protagonist, lives with father Tibby, a charmer ``with a disinclination to face inconvenient realities,'' a man who would rather shoot himself than sit and watch his caste's slow dying. The two make their home in the Dower House, attached to the main grand house of Dromore, where live Uncle Miles, Aunt Belinda, and Molly's languid cousin Sophie, who's her own age. Aunt Belinda forthrightly rescues Dromore from demolition after Miles's father's death; his thundering will actually designated the money to have it blown to bits. The modest, ``plain'' Molly whiles away her time in Dromore chatting with the much more restless Sophie. She's lovingly but firmly infused with tribal training by Belinda, from marmalade- making to the niceties of proper dinner seating. Only two major events involve major campaigns by Belinda, the maiden aunt Vera, and their array of servants: the coming-out party of the lawyer's sweetheart, and Sophie's hasty bad marriage to a wealthy Brit. Molly seems to be marked instead for Aunt Vera-hood, or at the least for life as a humble Keeper of the Flame in architecturally pristine houses, worn and damp yet crammed anyhow with the past's beautiful ``leftovers,'' all sited within a countryside of pastoral loveliness. Instead, she heads off to school in London, lives peacefully with two ancient aunts, goes to work for an elderly author, and meets up eventually with handsome, witty, flattering Gerald. He and she slog through some failed lovemaking; and Gerald, like Sophie, is rootless, tied to no real place of his own. Finally, though, Molly finds her man and makes her home elsewhere. The author of two well-received novels and an autobiography, Walled Gardens (1989), appropriately dedicates this to William Maxwell, who can also call forth a world in a single detail. Fine and poignant.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-17028-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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