Well-crafted and satisfying.
Delinsky (More Than Friends, 2006, etc.) offers a polished drama featuring an otherwise responsible mother lying to police to protect her daughter.
When Deborah picks up teenage daughter Grace from a study group, she lets the girl drive home. Big mistake. A pouring rain, a dimly lit road, a couple of clandestine beers in Grace and a mild argument between the two contribute to hitting the runner that suddenly appears before them. And not just anyone; when they find his body by the road, Grace recognizes her history teacher Calvin McKenna. A doctor, Deborah stabilizes the man, who doesn’t seem critically hurt, calls an ambulance and has Grace run home to watch her little brother Dylan. When the police later question Deborah, they assume she was driving, and she doesn’t correct them. McKenna dies the next day, under mysterious circumstances, making the accident a potential vehicular homicide. Now Deborah’s uncalculated lie of omission has more serious implications, particularly in Grace’s life: She’s guilt-ridden, terrified the truth will come out and withdrawing from school and friends. Deborah begins to wonder if McKenna is the real victim. After all, why was he running so far from home? Why didn’t he alert hospital staff about the medication he was taking? The accident investigation pushes the story forward, and Delinsky does a fine job creating sympathetic characters with personal problems. Deborah, for one, shares a medical practice with her imposing father, who may be turning into an alcoholic. Younger sister Jill owns a successful bakery and is unwed and pregnant. Ex-husband Greg manages to infuriate Deborah years after their divorce. And to top it off, Deborah’s best friend’s husband—now her lawyer in the matter of the accident—has pledged to her his undying love. Making everything just a bit more complicated is the mutual attraction between Deborah and Tom McKenna, the dead man’s brother. By novel’s end the bizarre life and death of Calvin McKenna is explained, and much domestic turmoil is soothed, with happier days in sight.
Well-crafted and satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51868-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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