An uneven portrait of a marriage that relives the early days of the Covid pandemic without offering fresh insight.
A struggling couple flees New York with their two daughters in the spring of 2020.
Pete and Alice leave New York for their vacation home in Maine at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Pete is in finance, while Alice is a playwright whose creative work—much to her chagrin—has become eclipsed by her role as stay-at-home mom. They abscond to their summer home both to escape the chaos and death that surround them in the city and to get some distance from “the Her,” a thinly sketched woman with whom Pete has been having a yearslong affair. What Pete and Alice fail to consider is the disdain with which they will be received by the terrified Maine locals, who, protective of their community, threaten and harass the New Yorkers. The summer home that has been a respite in years past transforms into something bleak, unwelcoming, and foreign. The novel tracks nearly a year with chapters told from various perspectives—Alice narrates most of the book, while occasional third-person chapters focus on Pete and tween daughters Iris and Sophie. Much of the book is concerned with the minutiae of pandemic life—for example, Pete’s search for reliable Wi-Fi and Alice’s rationing of toilet paper and food. Sprinkled throughout are flashbacks to earlier periods in Pete and Alice’s relationship that illuminate how the two met and fell in love as well as how their marriage began to strain under the weight of children, Alice’s frustrated creative ambitions, and Pete’s extramarital affair. In Maine, the two struggle to reconcile in the wake of Pete’s betrayal while also attempting to imagine a way forward as a family—whether in Maine or New York. Readers may struggle to connect with Alice, who lacks agency and seems more invested in the ennui of her upper-class existence than in the world around her or her supposed creative goals. Clichés abound, from buttoned-up WASPs to characters spontaneously throwing up when emotional.
An uneven portrait of a marriage that relives the early days of the Covid pandemic without offering fresh insight.Pub Date: July 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780063242661
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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