Finely crafted, disarmingly casual prose that quietly penetrates the reader’s mind and heart.
After two novels (The Communist's Daughter, 2007, etc.) prominently featuring politics and war, Bock offers a deceptively modest domestic drama about a man returning to Toronto from Italy after the breakup of his marriage.
After his Italian wife, Isabel, leaves him and takes up with another man, expat Canadian Charlie decides to escape his emotional pain by returning to Toronto to open a new branch of the language school chain he owns. He plans to be gone for one year and to stay in constant touch with his 12-year-old daughter, Ava. In Canada, Charlie reconnects with his older brother, Nate, from whom he’s been estranged since chauvinist swine Nate behaved particularly boorishly to Isabel years before. Now going through his own ugly divorce and desperate to maintain his relationship with his two sons, Nate at first seems chastened. But Charlie gradually realizes that Nate has not changed as much as he’d like to pretend and is rabidly bitter that the boys prefer staying with his ex-wife and her easygoing boyfriend. Charlie, who desperately misses Ava and questions why he decided to take himself out of her life, becomes increasingly protective of Nate’s boys. He is still pining for Isabel as well as Ava when he runs into his long-lost first love, Holly; he was running away from their troubled relationship when he first met Isabel. Once Charlie corrects his misreading of past events, he begins to take responsibility for his life. And by the time Nate spirals out of control, Charlie understands how fundamentally different a man is from his brother. The elliptical narrative, which sometimes leaves out connecting details, is more intriguing than confusing as Charlie sorts out the truth. On one level, the novel captures the difficulty men have reading women; on a deeper level, Bock plumbs issues of memory, moral responsibility and what constitutes a man’s real love for a woman.
Finely crafted, disarmingly casual prose that quietly penetrates the reader’s mind and heart.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-400-04463-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
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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