A challenging and important story about the difficulties of living with mental illness.
In this contemporary novel, a mother’s irrational fear that she might hurt her newborn baby leads to her abandoning the child.
White (Echoes of Family, 2016, etc.) opens her tale as Katelyn MacDonald sits in her daughter’s nursery, suffering severe panic. Struggling with postpartum OCD, Katelyn sees one violent image after another in her mind. Although her daughter, Maisie, is crying in her crib, Katelyn cowers on the floor, afraid to pick her up for fear that she might hurt the child. When her husband, Callum, returns home, Katelyn confesses her worries and begs for help. Unfortunately, he misinterprets the pleas as threats, taking Maisie and barring Katelyn from their bedroom. The narrative then jumps a decade into the future; Callum has become Maisie’s primary caretaker, and Katelyn has not been a part of her daughter’s upbringing. After several difficult years, Katelyn has relocated to Durham, North Carolina, and taken up sculpting as a means of confronting and channeling her anxiety. When her art brings her to a docent program in Raleigh, where she lived with Callum and her daughter, she soon runs into Maisie, a talented student. Maisie believes her mother is dead, and Katelyn does not reveal her identity. As Katelyn, who now goes by Katie Mack, gets to know Maisie through the docent program, she begins to suspect that her daughter has inherited OCD. Rather than leaving town, Katie decides it is time for her to step up and prevent OCD from ruining her daughter’s life the way it did her own. Throughout the absorbing novel, White skillfully shows both Maisie and Katie dealing with destructive and irrational fears (“An old image pounced. One she hadn’t seen in a while. Her hands picking up Maisie…and throwing her down the stairs. The images of harming Maisie had long vanished because Maisie was no longer part of her life. But what if they were back in the same city?”). By taking readers inside the minds of several characters, the author paints a clear and unforgiving picture of mental illness and its ramifications. Although the narrative grows increasingly convoluted as the book progresses, the story feels realistic and relevant. In accessible and engrossing prose, this sentimental tale also explores the struggles inherent in parenting, coupling, and maintaining meaningful relationships.
A challenging and important story about the difficulties of living with mental illness.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4898-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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