A deeply moving family tale written in a smoothly poetic style.
In this novel, a retired English teacher in a small Southern town struggles to accept the death of her ex-husband.
Janet Hall has moved back to Trion, Alabama, the intellectually cloistered hometown she fled to study literature. Decades ago, she married Jacob Hall, an ambitious fiction writer she’d met in high school. They eventually divorced—he wanted kids and she desired a life of independence, and Janet could no longer tolerate his serial infidelity. But 35 years later, they remain close friends, with their lives deeply enmeshed, both unable to cut the “umbilicus of passion,” a memorable coinage in Courington’s poetically nimble tale. Janet still loves Jacob and neglects to restore her maiden name, and he remains entirely dependent on her editorial oversight of his writing. Despite some success, he’s filled with remorse that he’s never published a major novel or lived up to the excited expectations of his childhood teachers. Janet is in Trion after inheriting a house from a relative. She threatens to cut off Jacob, who lives in Illinois, if he won’t join her, and then she learns he’s dead, apparently from a heart attack. But Janet begins to suspect that he killed himself—he valorized the suicide of great authors like Hemingway as an act of heroism. She becomes obsessed with discovering if she is ultimately responsible for his death, a desperate investigation poignantly portrayed by the author. Courington delicately explores the ways in which literature can emancipate or imprison those devoted to it—it can crush dreams of grandeur just as easily as it can conjure them. The author powerfully captures the impossibility of ever fully leaving one’s past behind, a lesson finally learned by Janet: “As a kid, I felt trapped here, and Jacob became my way out—the beginning of a life filled with hope and ideas, the vision of a new day. He said small towns are for the small-minded. And I agreed. But I’ve begun to realize that my world is like a worn Samsonite suitcase I carry wherever I go—scratched and dented with locks that can pop open at any time.” This is an affectingly melancholic work, laced with insights and communicated in a quietly meditative prose.
A deeply moving family tale written in a smoothly poetic style.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798989451364
Page Count: 219
Publisher: All Things That Matter Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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