Lyrical, assured, heartbreaking.
An intelligent, original coming-of-age novel from the author of The Anxiety of Everyday Objects (2004) and Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant (1994).
In the fall of 1975, Alison Glass moves from a working-class town to the tony suburb of Weston, Conn., where she begins junior high. Alison enjoys Kurt Vonnegut. Her lunches consist of health-food abominations concocted by her mother. She wears yellow plastic clogs, a floppy hat made of pink corduroy and a back brace. To say that she doesn’t fit into her new surroundings is an understatement. But Sheehan makes the wise and refreshing choice to not dwell on the indignities of junior high. Sensitive and perceptive, but not much given to self-pity, Alison is more bemused by the popular than desperate to join them. And she doesn’t need jocks and cheerleaders when she has Kate Hamilton. Beautiful, self-assured and quick with a devastating comeback, Kate transcends her school’s social scene, and her friendship protects Alison from the worst of its depredations. In any case, blonde girls in Shetland sweaters are nothing compared to the challenges Alison and Kate face at home. Alison’s scoliosis may require surgery—despite the brace, despite the New Age remedies her mother insists they try—and her parents’ marriage is falling apart. Kate’s situation is even more volatile: Her father, Tut, is a self-styled shaman and a sociopath given to cocaine-fueled rages. Sheehan’s depiction of Tut is typical of the way she creates all her characters. He’s clearly a monster—and his crushingly charismatic presence makes it more or less inevitable that this story will turn to tragedy—but he’s never a caricature. This is less loopy than the author’s previous work, but her language remains carefully off-kilter, gorgeously specific and shot through with unobtrusive wit. When she considers Kate’s hands for the first time, Alison thinks: “Her fingers were long and aristocratic, also a little red and chapped. They were the kind of fingers you’d expect on Joan of Arc or some other capable yet elegant heroine.”
Lyrical, assured, heartbreaking.Pub Date: July 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03767-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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