A masterful adoption tale: heart-rending and life-affirming in equal measure.
This debut fictional memoir features an adoptee who yearns for her biological mother.
Lexie Saunders is 5 years old when she discovers that she is adopted. The scene is a heartbreaking one. Before tucking Lexie into bed, her adoptive mother explains to her: “I picked you out of a nursery of babies.” After reasoning that she has been abandoned by her biological mother, the young girl asks, “Didn’t she love me?”—a question that her adoptive parent cannot answer. As Lexie falls asleep, she confides: “So began a lifetime of missing Mama. It was like living with a hole inside me.” The book opens at an unconventional moment—on Dec. 26, 1951—six weeks before Lexie’s birth. She narrates her birth mother’s story from inside the womb, explaining the reasons that the baby has to be given up for adoption. She recalls “Mama” being escorted to a “home for unwed mothers” by Lexie’s embarrassed grandmother. Lexie’s biological father, disparagingly called “Junior Sperm Donor,” is also described evading his responsibilities and declaring his intention to marry another girl. The narrative follows Lexie’s coming-of-age, the bonds and rifts with her adoptive family, and her escalating desire to fill the emotional hole inside herself by finding her biological mother. In this self-assured first novel, Bierkan is a powerfully evocative writer, and the way she depicts the bond between mother and unborn child is uncanny: “I breathed the lavender she dabbed behind each of her ears after a bath while she stroked my bottom nestled just behind her belly button.” This sense of safety is brutally juxtaposed with Lexie being “unceremoniously dropped into the arms of the first of many faceless strangers” after her birth and the scent of lavender growing “more and more faint.” In this poignant work filled with emptiness, loss, love, and hope, the prose is startlingly realistic, and readers will be forgiven for mistaking the book for nonfiction. The result is a deeply affecting story that may prove a source of comfort to those with similar adoption experiences.
A masterful adoption tale: heart-rending and life-affirming in equal measure.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4897-1292-9
Page Count: 286
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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 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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