Readable and forgettable.
An accidental death leads to secrets revealed and second thoughts expressed in McKenzie’s latest (Forgotten, 2012, etc.).
Jeff Manning is fatally struck by a car when he decides to walk home after firing yet another hapless co-worker at the odious management consultant–dominated company in which he is a reluctantly rising executive. His wife, Claire, is devastated even though it’s clear from her very first monologue—as she anxiously wonders why Jeff is late—that there are simmering tensions in the marriage. They might have something to do with Tish, who works in HR for the same company; though she and Jeff are at branches in different towns, they’ve developed a warm email relationship since meeting at a corporate retreat. But it could also be the fact that Claire was once the girlfriend of Jeff’s older brother, Tim, or that she’s been emotionally distant ever since she lost a baby four years ago, when their son Seth was 8. Readers learn all this, as well as about Tish’s saintly doctor-husband, Brian, and their supersmart 11-year-old daughter, Zoey, via first-person narratives by Claire, Tish—and Jeff, which is odd, since he gets killed on Page 8. In straightforward, realistic fiction like this, a dead narrator should really be explained, but McKenzie simply plows ahead, developing her story via three points of view that follow each other in the same order for the entire novel, adding to the already heavy sense of predictability. The aggravations of corporate life, the compromises and disappointments inherent in long marriages, the processes of grieving are all depicted with reasonable insight, but there’s little new here, and what plot development there is may give readers a sense of being jerked around: Zoey faints, twice, but it’s just stress; Claire and Tim kiss and Jeff sees them, but when Claire tells him nothing else happened, he believes her. The “truth” about Jeff and Tish’s relationship comes much too late and isn’t much of a revelation.
Readable and forgettable.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-26497-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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