Another treat from the great Anshaw: sharply observed, unsentimentally compassionate, always cognizant of life’s...
In her early 40s, Cate is tired of low-paying theater gigs, handouts from her parents, and a furtive affair with Dana, who will never leave her live-in girlfriend.
It’s also annoying that she can’t dislodge ex-husband Graham, just dumped by wife No. 3 from her spare bedroom and from his obsession with government surveillance—paranoia entirely justified, in his view, by Donald Trump’s recent election. Still, Cate seems on her way to better things; she’s dating well-heeled Maureen and lands a job designing an off-Broadway show for a high-powered writer-director team that could ratchet up her career. However, menacing interspersed sections voiced by Nathan, a sociopath living with drug addicted Irene, suggest danger ahead. It’s quickly evident that their crash pad is somewhere near Cate’s best friend Neale’s house, and as Nathan’s monologues grow increasingly creepier, we wait for a collision. Meanwhile, Anshaw (Carry the One, 2012, etc.) crafts an engaging narrative with her customary precision and tart humor: A blowsy, “recently pretty” character “appears to do most of her shopping at Renaissance fairs,” and parking enforcement in Chicago, “once a lazy, city-run revenue effort, has been sold off to a ruthless corporation based somewhere in the Middle East…meter readers in Day-Glo vests troll relentlessly, ubiquitously.” In a cast of richly drawn characters, Cate is foremost: oddly maladroit socially for a theater worker, madly in love with Graham’s dog, Sailor, prone to imagining people’s backstories (including the décor of their homes) in judgmental terms, but essentially kind. She’s totally unprepared for the brutal confrontation that occurs halfway through the novel, but she forges ahead with her big opportunity in New York, just the way people do in real life. Anshaw never amps up her fiction with melodrama or neat conclusions, and she leaves her characters changed but by no means finished in an indeterminate yet satisfying finale.
Another treat from the great Anshaw: sharply observed, unsentimentally compassionate, always cognizant of life’s complexities.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4779-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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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