Histrionics aside, an insider account with real teeth.
Pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba as seen through the eyes of a young refugee.
Like her protagonist, Nora, debut novelist Samartin left Cuba with her family after Castro’s revolution and settled in Los Angeles. In occasionally overwrought language, she spins a gripping tale. Nora’s extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins are first seen in their idyllic haute bourgeoisie milieu: chaperoned dances, sumptuous dinners, cocktails on sun-swept terraces, swims in limpid, azure waters. As revolution looms, Nora and her cousin, beautiful Alicia, are mostly preoccupied with boys, especially Tony, the gorgeous biracial nephew of Great Aunt Panchita’s maid, Lola. When Castro’s advent destroys their comfortable existence, the Garcia clan flees Cuba as soon as they can bribe their way out, leaving Tía Panchita and Alicia behind—she has married Tony, a staunch Communist, over family objections. In the book’s balky midsection, the emphasis shifts from turmoil in Cuba to Nora’s more conventional problems—adjustment to America, teenage angst and a growing attachment to an older teacher, Jeremy. Letters from Alicia filter through, recounting ever-escalating crises: After a utopian start on a sugar-cane collective, there’s the birth of Lucinda, who is blind; Tony is called to serve in the Angolan war; Lucinda’s hope for a cure is blighted by red tape; and Tony is imprisoned. As Nora’s life improves—she’s in graduate school and married to Jeremy—Alicia’s spins apart. She must trade sexual favors with a prison guard to ensure Tony’s safety. Later, she turns to prostitution at one of the glitzy hotels the government sponsors to distract tourists from Havana’s decay. Returning, Nora finds matters far worse than Alicia’s letters intimated: Alicia has HIV. Unless Nora contrives a rescue, Alicia will be taken to a colony where AIDS sufferers are warehoused until death, and Lucinda will go to a state orphanage. The shocking revelations that pile up at the close threaten to swamp the story, like the sharks that will eventually circle Nora’s escape boat.
Histrionics aside, an insider account with real teeth.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-8779-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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