Suspenseful, moving, and full of inspiration and insight about parenting a child with autism.
A couple driven to desperation by the challenges of raising an extraordinary 13-year-old and her younger sister moves off the grid with a charismatic parenting guru.
From the first sentences of this unusual and compelling novel—“In another world, you make it work. In another world, you never even hear the name ‘Scott Bean’ ”—pages turn with the momentum of an emotional thriller. But Parkhurst (The Nobodies Album, 2011, etc.) offers much more than the gradual dealing out of the disaster that awaits the Hammond family after they give up their lives in Washington, D.C., to move to a wilderness camp in New Hampshire led by maverick autism counselor Scott Bean. The characters of Alexandra Hammond, her husband, Josh, and their daughters, Tilly and Iris, go straight to your heart via three intertwined narrative threads. One belongs to Iris, 11: the story of what happens at Camp Harmony unfolds through her sharp, Harriet-the-Spy–esque eyes. Each family has one kid who’s different, she realizes, though they are different in very different ways; she’s the “normal” one, the “good” one. When she overhears her mother describe her as “NT” she hopes it means something like Natural Talent; it’s disappointing to find out it’s just “neurotypical.” Alexandra tells the story of the family’s life leading up to the move: her marriage to her teenage sweetheart, the births of their daughters, the realization of Tilly’s difference, the ever growing stress associated with it. “Here are some of the things you’re not posting on Facebook during February of 2010: Alexandra Moss Hammond’s daughter has changed the name of Shel Silverstein’s poetry collection to 'Where the Pussy Ends.' Alexandra Hammond’s daughter just said in the post office, 'Your tits are huge. Did I really used to suck on those?' " A third series of chapters is written by Tilly at some unspecified future date, brilliant, funny, and beautiful monologues that show how deeply Parkhurst understands what she’s writing about.
Suspenseful, moving, and full of inspiration and insight about parenting a child with autism.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-56260-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
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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