Still, the narrative moves like a house afire, and its racy energy keeps our attention riveted.
Hardy and Dickens are the probable inspirations for this sprawling, old-fashioned tale of two maritime Newfoundland families.
Award-winning Canadian author Morrisey (Kit’s Law, 2001) sets her second novel among Atlantic “outports”—small fishing communities where generations of the Gale and Osmond families have lived and toiled—in the early years of WWII just prior to Newfoundland’s “confederation” with Canada. A shipwrecked family, the O’Maras, are rescued and housed, but its eldest son Gideon is severely injured and disfigured in a shooting accident. Job Gale volunteers for military service abroad, leaving behind his fearful wife Sare and daughters Clair and Missy. In an increasingly convoluted narrative, first told from Clair’s viewpoint, Morrissey details Job’s return from battle (a haunted shell of himself), his family’s deliverance from the protection of malevolent (Uriah Heep–like) Uncle Sim, and Clair’s career as a schoolteacher and marriage to family friend Luke Osmond. Clair’s young daughter Hannah then picks up the narrative, recounting her own girlhood, the “shame” borne by her pregnant unmarried Aunt Missy, and the chain of (awfully melodramatic) incidents that follow Job’s death, the visit of an “old vet” who had fought beside Job and knows the real source of the latter’s guilty despair, and the revealed truth about Gideon O’Mara’s “accident.” The story groans beneath the weight of Morrissey’s overplotting, but she knows her people intimately, and they’re all memorable. Their salty semiliterate dialogue is perfectly caught “He don’t give we nothing”); but Morrissey’s omniscient voice is often portentously trained (“a scorn that watered itself with rage, anguish, fear and other ills that, left alone, became too monumental to disperse within and is charted into that darker unknown self”). A climactic flurry of reconciliations likewise defies credibility.
Still, the narrative moves like a house afire, and its racy energy keeps our attention riveted.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-18927-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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