This is an entertaining and ultimately sweet story, but it’s best if you don’t think about it too hard.
A college student hunts for a lost Brontë artifact in this debut novel with academic overtones.
Samantha Whipple, the last of the Brontës, has at last come into her inheritance. Her beloved father, Tristan, was descended from a cousin of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne’s. Tristan died in a fire when Samantha was 15; a year before his death he told Sam she would someday inherit “The Warnings of Experience.” Is it a lost Brontë manuscript? A painting? A philosophy? A joke? Now a prickly first-year student at Oxford, Sam meets a banker to receive her legacy, but the shoebox she’s given contains nothing but a bookmark, the first clue in a treasure hunt. The quest takes her on a gentle jaunt through the major Brontë novels, highlights of critical theory, and Yorkshire in a storm. It makes for pleasant enough reading—Lowell has an agreeably sarcastic style and a way with similes—but poor estate planning. If you’re bothering to give a banker a shoebox, why not put the MacGuffin itself inside? Hiding the object out in the world makes no legal or practical sense. None of the usual explanations for fictional treasure hunts apply: it’s not as if rival heirs or supernatural forces are racing to get the thing first, and when Sam does eventually find it, she has no legal evidence that it belongs to her (not that Lowell seems to notice). Sam explains her father’s puzzling behavior by appealing to pedagogy: “He was trying to teach me the right way to read.” Also trying to teach her the right way to read is her professor, the handsome, brooding James Timothy Orville III, who insults her in private tutoring sessions; readers familiar with Jane Eyre will quickly see where that relationship is heading. Refreshingly, though, the novel draws its references most frequently from the work of the youngest, least interesting, and therefore least overexposed Brontë sister, Anne.
This is an entertaining and ultimately sweet story, but it’s best if you don’t think about it too hard.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2421-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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