An excruciatingly slow novel in which sentimental self-absorption rules despite nods to social issues like child abuse and...
Two strangers, each harboring guilty sorrow over past losses, offer each other solace in this introspective novel from Reed (Things We Set on Fire, 2013).
Recently separated from her Irish husband, Niall, who has moved from their home in Ireland to Australia for reasons that may or may not have to do with her alcoholism, 35-year-old writer June returns to property on the Oregon coast where she was born and which she’s inherited from her grandparents, who raised her. Alone in the carriage house where she lived with her father until his suicide when she was 7, she struggles daily to work on her new book and avoid drink. Sight unseen she hires a contractor named Jameson, known to be “unorthodox,” to renovate the main house, which her grandparents built from a Sears kit in 1940. Jameson currently lives across the state with his wife, Sarah Anne, a potter, and their 2-year-old foster child, Ernest. The couple used to live in June’s coastal community, but they left three years earlier after their 7-year-old twins were fatally shot by a teenager in a convenience store. While caring for Ernest is renewing Sarah Anne’s energy, Jameson remains paralyzed. He takes June’s job out of financial desperation. Although their phone conversations are fraught with significant undercurrents from the beginning, Jameson does not actually see June for the first 150 of the novel’s pages. Instead Reed describes in every way possible June's and Jameson’s emotional wounds to prove they are soul mates in sensitivity. When the two finally spend time together, Jameson's desire to talk to June, to ask her questions—in stark contrast to his tiptoeing silence around Sarah Anne—matches June’s desire to share even those secrets she kept from patient, loving Niall. But can either find a way beyond loss?
An excruciatingly slow novel in which sentimental self-absorption rules despite nods to social issues like child abuse and gun violence.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-81735-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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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