A pleasant enough diversion that takes itself more seriously than it probably should.
A feisty aristocrat seeks out her destiny at the end of the world.
In her debut novel, Hannah indulges a fascination with lighthouses and historical fiction to craft an imaginative fantasy that veers precariously between tasteful romance and bodice-ripper. “Someone once told me that every tower had a ghost, and every ghost had a story,” begins narrator Sara Stevenson, the fictionalized daughter of the famous Scottish lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson. Newly pregnant, the scandalized girl has been exiled to Cape Wrath, the most northwesterly point in Great Britain, in the year 1814. Furious with her family, she mourns the loss of her suitor, Thomas Crichton, a sailor who mysteriously vanished on the day of their planned elopement. Her reluctant protector in this uneasy locale is the secretive light-keep William Campbell, a gentle but brusque man who Sara seems to be forever accusing of ill intentions, even as he keeps a secret of his own. The collision of these two characters is highly entertaining, but Hannah muddies the fish-out-of-water story with an incongruous mystery. Sara is intrigued when she receives in the post an unusual timepiece, delivered by an Oxford scholar who promised to return it to another woman, Sara Crichton, at the wish of her dying husband. This wrinkle makes all the time-traveling in Diana Gabaldon’s series seem absolutely straightforward by comparison, although Hannah manages to keep the mystery afloat right up until the story’s end. Along the way, though, the author often makes too obvious an attempt to formalize her language while indulging in lots of hand-wringing about love torn asunder. Yet readers may find themselves won over by Stevenson’s fundamental conflict. “Two different men from totally different worlds there could not be,” she says, “and, God help me, but my heart was overwhelmed with a want of both of them.”
A pleasant enough diversion that takes itself more seriously than it probably should.Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-52054-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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