An engrossing, highly rewarding read that marks McKeon as a writer to watch.
A debut novel of love and loss set in contemporary Ireland, where a family’s troubled past cast its shadow over an uncertain future.
Looking for a distraction from writing his stalled thesis, Mark Casey falls for a green-eyed girl he meets at a Dublin pub. Joanne Lynch, however, is more than a pretty solicitor trainee—she comes from the same patch of rural farmland where Mark grew up. The son of a demanding and truculent farmer, Mark resents the time he must take away from his studies at Trinity College to help out at the family farm in County Longford. That his thesis is going nowhere only adds more strain to his relationship with his father. Joanne is caught in a similar bind. Her late father was a notorious scoundrel whose dodgy dealings earned the enmity of the Casey family, but Joanne is ignorant of the feud. As the new couple navigates their complicated pasts, Joanne becomes pregnant, igniting the fuse to the powder keg into which the young lovers have unwittingly blundered. Midway through the novel, an act of horrendous violence brings the families together in unexpected ways. Though it's not quite Romeo and Juliet, McKeon makes masterful use of the conflict between the two families to propel the story forward and gird scenes of ordinary family drama with tension and dread. Digressions into Joanne’s legal work and the subject of Mark’s thesis (the novels of English author Maria Edgeworth) prove to be welcome asides that add depth to the characters. For instance, Joanne’s infatuation with her client’s eccentric mother, a woman she only knows through court transcripts, suggests Joanne might be better-suited to the scholarly work that Mark seems incapable of finishing. At times, Mark’s struggle with his father takes on undertones of William Faulkner and Joanne is as nuanced and knowable as the heroine of an Edna O’Brien novel.
An engrossing, highly rewarding read that marks McKeon as a writer to watch.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1054-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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