A solid debut, if a bit predictable.
A woman has to reassess everything when an unexpected moment of heroism shatters her image of her life in Harris’ debut novel.
Grace Atherton is 39 and content with her life. She owns a shop in a little town in Kent, England, where she makes violins and cellos and has a decent-sized home, car, and a good relationship with her longtime boyfriend, David. On a getaway weekend to Paris, David’s instinctive reaction to a woman’s falling onto the Metro tracks leads to security footage of the couple going viral worldwide. The sudden attention throws a light onto all the secrets David has been keeping and forces Grace to deal with those and secrets from her own past that she has been hiding from for 20 years. With the help of a whimsical old man who frequents her shop and the angst-ridden teenage sales clerk she has befriended, Grace has to pick up the pieces of her life and put them back together in a way that, perhaps, fits even better than before. Though the first third of the novel suffers from Grace's rather unbelievable gullibility, it’s saved by the strength of the writing. Even when it’s hard to swallow that Grace truly believes what she’s saying in her narration, Harris’ capable prose draws the reader along to see what happens next. The second half is where Harris really finds her stride, and Grace’s rebuilding her life and forming stronger relationships with Nadia and Mr. Williams is where the novel shines. Especially poignant is Grace’s reckoning with what had happened her first year of music school and discovering another side of the story. Grace is a very real character even if she is exasperating at times.
A solid debut, if a bit predictable.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9650-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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