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
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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