A bit of a sophomore slump, but this talented newcomer’s gifts for characterization and atmosphere are as sharp as ever.
In her tale of a fraught lifelong friendship, DiSclafani (The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, 2013) again investigates the power and perils of female sexuality.
Oil-rich 20th-century Houston is the atmospheric setting: in the privileged world Joan Fortier and Cecilia “Cece” Buchanan inhabit, women have little to do besides redecorate their lavish houses, attend meetings of various social clubs, and drunkenly while away the evenings—with or without their businessman husbands—at the Shamrock Hotel’s Cork Club. It’s typical of the power distribution in their relationship that narrator Cece’s first name is also Joan, but she’s gone by her middle name ever since they started kindergarten together in 1937. Now it’s 1957, and Cece is the wife of solid, stable Ray and mother to 3-year-old Tommy, whose failure to talk is her one real concern. But she spends plenty of time worrying over single, scandalous Joan anyway; the girls’ closeness was cemented by the two-plus years Cece lived with the Fortiers after her mother died while she was in high school, and the worrying began when Joan ran away for a year in 1950. Cece can’t understand why Joan yearns for the wider world beyond Texas, and she strives constantly to protect her friend from the consequences of her reckless behavior in censorious Houston. Her obsession with Joan is a source of tension in her marriage, and it’s a problem for the novel too; a predictable pattern emerges of Joan acting out, Cece fussing, and Ray seething. We see that Cece has poured all the emotions stymied by her difficult, critical mother and largely absent father into her feelings for Joan, but after a while her neediness is as frustrating to the reader as to Ray. When Joan’s secret emerges, it’s painful but predictable. Nonetheless, DiSclafani paints a rich portrait of a cloistered society and its damaged inhabitants in a consistently absorbing narrative.
A bit of a sophomore slump, but this talented newcomer’s gifts for characterization and atmosphere are as sharp as ever.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-316-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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