Widger has created a delicate suspension bridge out of her characters’ relationships to one another and the world, and...
This entertaining debut novel unsparingly takes on damaged family ecosystems and the show-business machine.
It is no surprise to learn that the family in Real Happy Family is really unhappy. Precocious Lorelei, barely out of her teens, is a disgraced reality show also-ran. Holed up in Reno with her milquetoast boyfriend, she is hiding from life and descending rapidly into meth addiction. Colleen, her mother, is the source of Lorelei’s greatest support but also of her career’s swift implosion. Lorelei has cut off Colleen, and without her daughter nearby to carry her own dashed ambitions, Colleen drifts desperately in Fresno. She is unable to connect with her morally upstanding husband, Carl, consoling herself instead with prescription drugs, militant exercise and lavish purchases made on a secret credit card. Carl is going through his own quiet torture, equally worried about Lorelei but baffled and displeased by his enabling, glamour-hungry wife. Meanwhile, Carl’s son from a previous marriage, Darren, is about to pack off for a job that could potentially make his career as a cinematographer but which would take him away from his wife, Robin, whom he’s just started injecting with hormones to help her get pregnant. And the sour grape on the sundae: Colleen blames Robin for everything, because Robin is Lorelei’s agent. Around and around it goes, each character in a complex spiral of his or her own making but each with the power to change the others’ lives, a power that increases exponentially as the book progresses. While the locations shift per character, the real setting is Hollywood, especially the new Hollywood of reality television and its creeping reach into everyday life.
Widger has created a delicate suspension bridge out of her characters’ relationships to one another and the world, and throughout the course of the novel, she steadily, craftily adds weight, making for compulsive reading.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-26361-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Lake Union/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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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