A novel with realistic portrayals of marriage and friendship, weighed down by unnecessary characterization.
A debut novel about family dynamics and the complexities of longtime relationships.
Green’s work—set in the 1970s, ’80s, and 2000s, and in many cities and countries all over the world—chronicles the complicated friendship of Americans Dina Aharoni Wasserman and Julia Cawley Kinsella, two women who’ve devoted the better part of their adult lives to raising their children and accommodating their husbands’ demanding medical careers. But as Dina notes to Julia early on, they lack ways to vent their frustrations: “God forbid I complain. I’m a ‘doctor’s wife’, what else could I possibly want?” Although the pair come from very different backgrounds—Dina’s ancestry is Sephardic Jewish, and Julia’s is Irish Catholic—they are similar in one key way: They both want to feel a sense of purpose and passion beyond their domestic roles: Dina has “wanted to write stories for as long as she could remember,” while Julia longs for “sexual energy or interest” from a man other than her husband. As the novel progresses, Green shifts between the two narratives, devoting chapters to other members of Dina’s or Julia’s extended families, which gives the story greater scope. Readers learn, for example, about the men and women who became the grandparents and parents of Dina, Julia, and their husbands, and about the children of both couples. As these interconnected narratives unfold, readers begin to understand that there’s been a falling out between Dina and Julia—one that leads to serious consequences. Clues are effectively revealed through revelations regarding family relationships and genetics, which results in a rather complicated narrative. Green is a strong writer, especially when it comes to descriptions of marital tension; at one point, for instance, she notes that Dina’s husband’s “tardiness was just another minor skirmish in the war of their marriage, a war they both needed to win.” However, the overabundance of voices causes the narrative to feel excessively detailed, which pulls the focus away from one of the novel’s most salient themes: the connection that Dina and Julia form over their resentment of the limits on their lives.
A novel with realistic portrayals of marriage and friendship, weighed down by unnecessary characterization.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2021
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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