Occasional eye-rolls aside, there is something iridescent about this novel.
A lyrical, and lyric-filled, portrait of a family in love and sorrow.
This whimsical, bittersweet debut novel recalls the work of filmmaker Wes Anderson, both in subject (a complicated, tightknit family full of smart, worried people) and in style (full of quirky, impossible-to-ignore formal choices). Reilly’s central pair of sensitive, bohemian New Yorkers are aspiring actress Mathilde Spicer and record-store owner Claudio Simone, who meet in 1988 at a vodka-soaked party given by an NYU undergraduate. Also introduced in the opening section of the book are Mathilde’s gay younger brother and Claudio’s mentally ill sister—each of whom remains within the cocoon of family the couple spins as they move through adulthood. In the second, much longer, portion of the book, which follows the family to the year 2016 and beyond, the focus is on the couple’s daughters, three Salinger-esque siblings: supersmart Natasha, poetic Lucy, and Carly, adopted from China. The reader is given access to each of their Hearts as their tragedy slowly unfolds, as do the borderline-twee affectations of the prose. The word Heart is capitalized every time it's used, even in the middle of a word, like sweetHeart. The word god is lowercased, even if it’s the first word in the sentence. A car is said to be “hindering” in front of a building; a woman with many children gets their names “whisked up,” someone’s hair color is “blanched” blond. Several of Lucy’s poems are included, as is a pseudo-index (with lots of page references for the entries for Heart and god, but none for “doctors apologizing”). From its title to its chapter names to the characters' interior monologues, the book is drenched in song lyrics, predominantly Beatles, but extending all the way to Badfinger. At one point, to answer the question “What can you do?,” Claudio considers lyrics by Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Bob Seger, Sam and Dave, Bob Dylan, and the Monkees, all in one paragraph.
Occasional eye-rolls aside, there is something iridescent about this novel.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1687-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
PROFILES
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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