A welcome return for the author.
Pelletier’s long-awaited addition to the tragicomic annals of fictional Mattagash, Maine.
Mattagash is a town divided by a one-way bridge, a crossing that can only be made by one car at a time. The bridge will figure heavily in the at-times-farcical story, but in the meantime, Pelletier is bent on making us love the “cantankerous” men and the staunch yet wistful women who people this ultrarustic pocket of the Northeast. Many voices, most of whom share distant or close kinship, alternate points of view. Orville, 65, the town mailman, is staring down retirement as he delivers mail for the last time. He can’t ignore the insults that his archrival Harry has heaped on him, most recently a regulation-flouting, moose-shaped mailbox. Since the kids have left, Orville’s wife, Meg, is more absorbed by computer games involving penguins than her paunchy husband. Billy, a downstater, has decided peddling pot and pills is safer in Mattagash than in Portland, where he’s left a trail of drug debts and broken hearts. It’s been awhile since he’s gotten a shipment from his connections, cartel wannabes the Delgato cousins: Instead, their parcels contain fake fingers. Trying to rectify his poverty by doing odd jobs with his own fifth (or sixth?) cousin Buck, Billy is in increasing danger of freezing to death in an unheated camper and a classic Mustang convertible with the top permanently down as a Maine winter looms. Harry, recipient of a Purple Heart, is still tormented by flashbacks and dreams of combat in Vietnam and guilt over the deaths of his buddies and the carnage inflicted by both sides. Since his wife, Emily, died of cancer years before, Harry, though respected in town, has been something of a recluse. With so many characters, a coherent plot takes awhile to emerge, and when it does, it neatly melds the fallout from Billy’s traffic in bootleg Viagra with the more profound ramifications of wounds, both physical and psychic.
A welcome return for the author.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8073-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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