Hanauer delivers a novel that is rich with relatable characters, realistic in its approach and highly readable.
Family dynamics change when a husband abandons his wife and two children.
Nutritionist Eve Adams has gradually become her family’s primary emotional and financial support while husband Eric struggles with his identity as an artist, businessperson and family man. Following an evening out to celebrate Eve’s successful publication of a book, Eric volunteers to drive the baby sitter back to her apartment. Instead of returning home, however, he embarks on a cross-country trip from Massachusetts to Arizona to deliver the baby sitter to her terminally ill mother and to visit his own mother. Like many women in her position, Eve is forced to come to terms with her new role. Now, she truly is in charge of her family’s future, and she must learn how to juggle parenting, career and friendships. She must make decisions that are difficult and painful at times, but with these feelings are moments of exhilaration and self-fulfillment. Her 14-year-old daughter, Magnolia, has entered the difficult stage so many parents have trouble understanding, and Eve is caught between wanting to allow her daughter the independence she demands while still trying to protect her from the greater evils of the world. Her son, Danny, 8, remains blessedly naïve and sweet, but he spends hours playing video games and takes little interest in other activities. Meanwhile, Eric remains in Arizona, and Eve ignores his efforts to communicate with her. And, once confident in her career, Eve now worries that she is not doing enough to help her clients. The author’s portrayal of Eve as a woman who has no choice but to muddle through and do the best she can will resonate with many women who have been in, or are going through, similar circumstances.
Hanauer delivers a novel that is rich with relatable characters, realistic in its approach and highly readable.Pub Date: June 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2641-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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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