Like its protagonist, this novel aspires to more than it achieves.
A family bursts at the seams as long-buried secrets are revealed.
Upon reading the opening scene of this debut novel, in which a one-time child TV star named Benji Fisher, reduced in boozy middle age to playing King Hamlet’s ghost in an upstate production, flees his dressing room, lurches into the woods, decides against suicide, then falls 30 feet into a dry streambed, the reader settles in for what looks to be a comedy. But just as quickly, there are intimations of another sort of book—one which interleaves brief, mysterious cris de coeur from Benji’s father, Henry Fisher, a prominent novelist now descending into Alzheimer's disease. Henry’s interior monologues refer to a long-lost character named Jane whose role in the Fishers’ past will remain unclear for quite a while. Meanwhile, the rest of the family assembles to figure out who will take care of Benji. Aside from Benji’s 658 Facebook friends (“He was after all, the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question ('80s edition)”), the candidates are mother Evelyn, long-suffering older sister Claudia, and a lovely 25-year-old actress named Cat McCarthy.Cat played Ophelia in the ill-fated production of Hamlet, and while it’s unsurprising that Benji was lusting after her, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher that she’s fallen for him. “She’d rented all four seasons of Prodigy while he was in the hospital, all five of his films, even A Hamster for Hannah, and discussed them without mockery, seriously, as a body of (her word) work that might one day have him thanking Uta Hagen from the dais.” Cat shows up at the hospital with a gift, a copy of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which becomes a major plot element when yet another mystery character arrives on the scene. Max Davis is an actual prodigy, a 22-year-old cellist with a secret connection to the family, now in the process of writing an opera based on To the Lighthouse. But tragedy is on the way for all of them.
Like its protagonist, this novel aspires to more than it achieves.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5200-3
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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