Marred only by stiff dialogue, Laborie’s debut impresses with a sweeping saga full of historical detail and familial...
From the rise of industrialism through the bitter dregs of World War II, a ruthless patriarch strives to restore his family to social and economic eminence.
In the wee hours, a cloaked man delivers a mysterious child to the mother superior of a Parisian orphanage, saving one life but perhaps jeopardizing another. This rather gothic opening—riddled with dark alcoves along narrow avenues under an icy moon—foreshadows not only the web of lies that will constrain this orphan’s life, but also the web of family ties that Anselme Rochefort weaves to bind and ultimately estrange his children. (And that orphan will return to trouble the Rochefort empire.) The son of the powerfully connected and financially savvy Charles-Honoré Rochefort, Anselme nearly bankrupts the family textile business after his father’s death. Determined to prove his worth—but equally determined to indulge in his vices—Anselme sets out, coldbloodedly, to rebuild the family’s reputation and fortune. A marriage of convenience to the beautiful, wealthy, orphaned, and pregnant Eleanor Letellier infuses Anselme with much-needed capital and offers Eleanor social sanctuary. A broken heart, however, drives Eleanor to take her own life soon after the birth of her daughter, Catherine. Ever practical, Anselme quickly remarries, encouraging his second wealthy bride, Elisabeth Langlade, to raise Catherine as her own. Fifteen years and four children later, Elisabeth dotes on Catherine, Anselme ignores her, and, desperate for love, Catherine falls into the arms of a penniless man Anselme could never consider as a son-in-law. This is a world in which the highborn have the power to determine which families’ reputations are sterling enough to participate in economies both social and financial. Arranging the warp and weft of his children’s lives proves difficult for Anselme, however, particularly as his younger son, Sebastian, is drawn into the free love of political radicals and his favorite daughter, 9-year-old Faustine, falls in love with a farmer’s adopted son. The old world of convention collides with a new world of experimentation with calamitous consequences.
Marred only by stiff dialogue, Laborie’s debut impresses with a sweeping saga full of historical detail and familial melodrama.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0077-2
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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