Lovely writing wrapped around an often unpalatable core.
A family in a remote lighthouse comes under the spell of an unusual woman and her even more unusual daughter.
The Borya brothers are young when the five of them, and their impoverished parents, move from their shack near a fishing village to take over an isolated lighthouse. Eventually, Osip, a middle brother, becomes the lighthouse keeper; Sevastian-Benedikt, the oldest, hunts and traps to keep them alive. As time passes and a tragedy reduces their number, Sevastian takes up with Noé, a strange woman who lives in a small cabin apart from the rest of the family. Though Noé is Sevastian’s woman and bears him a number of children who run wild through the rugged landscape where they live, Osip is nevertheless obsessed with her, and the two begin sleeping together. Noé rarely speaks, and she has little to do with the children she births. She knows the land and the animals intimately: She can skin whales, handle jellyfish. Noé and Sevastian’s daughter, Mie, has a similar talent, able to cast her mind into the bodies of other creatures (and sometimes inanimate objects) to fuse her consciousness with animals and explore the world. At 12, Mie now wants to understand humans better and turns her attention toward what seems most natural: sex. This is Wilhelmy’s third novel, though the first to be translated into English, and she is a meticulous recorder of the dramatic wilderness of what seems to be coastal Quebec. But her desire to show readers how, left to their own devices, humans will behave in the amoral ways that nature produces in the animal kingdom seems to betray a deep cynicism. And Wilhelmy’s detached look at incest and child sexuality may leave many readers cold.
Lovely writing wrapped around an often unpalatable core.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4870-0610-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Arachnide/House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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