A measured generational family saga about the passing of a way of life.
A family of fishermen struggles to evolve with the times in Johnston’s debut literary novel.
The Brennans of Worland, Minnesota, make their living in two ways. The first is commercial fishing on the Lake of the Woods, where for three generations they have caught walleye and sturgeon using pound nets. The second is mink farming—a complementary business, since a diet of fish is, as patriarch Arthur claims, “low cost and produces lustrous fur” in the minks. In 1960, Arthur’s 21-year-old son, Pete, returns home after his two-year stint in the Army, craving freedom and the open water. Arthur puts him to work on the family fishing boat, but on his very first day, Pete accidentally severs his leg with a cable. Pete fears his whole future has been snatched away from him (“In a matter of days, I’d gone from everything possible to nothing possible”), but his fortunes improve with the arrival of Julia, the lovely nurse who helps him adapt to life with a prosthetic. Pete eventually masters his balance enough to get back on the boat. Arthur’s older son, Wayne, a former hockey player and Air Force vet, has been given control of the mink farm, but his drinking is beginning to cause trouble. When new laws against pound nets threaten their livelihood, both Brennan businesses are at risk of capsizing. Into this climate steps the next generation of Brennans in the form of Pete and Julia’s son, Jay, who takes over as narrator from his father about halfway through the novel. When Jay suffers his own fishing boat accident, it seems the family’s fate might finally be sealed.
One gets the sense from Johnston’s plainspoken prose that he intimately knows the setting and the occupations he writes about. Here, Pete shows his sister, Mary, an artist whose marriage to the town’s rival business clan causes interfamily tensions, how to kill a mink: “I shoved the animal headfirst into the shoebox-sized device and held its tail with my right hand. Inside, the animal’s skull was under a steel plate attached to a twelve-inch handle that stuck out the top…A metallic crack bounced off the top of the shed. The animal stopped moving.” The plot’s procession through the decades allows it to nod toward various social changes of the later 20th century (the animal rights movement comes for the mink farm), but in some ways the sweeping time frame works against the book’s dramatic potential—the story ends up being less about the conflicts between its characters than the unsparing passage of time, which comes for all industries and those who work them. When, near the end of the book, a would-be customer asks Pete if he knows where he can get any walleye, Pete replies, with blunt resignation, “I’m the last commercial fisherman on Lake of the Woods and the last walleye fisherman in the United States.” To Johnston’s credit, by the time this line arrives, the reader understands the weight those words carry.
A measured generational family saga about the passing of a way of life.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781962834353
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Calumet Editions
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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