Nothing great or earth shattering, but a sweet, if clichéd, romantic Christmas tale that will warm some hearts. Fans of...
A country music star finishes a tour in New York City and is summoned home to Oklahoma for Christmas by his mother, but to get there, he’ll face a string of travel disasters and meet a fellow voyager who just might be the woman of his dreams.
Heath Sawyer has reached the pinnacle of his career, ending a long, successful tour at Madison Square Garden just days before Christmas. Contemplating a tropical vacation for the holiday, his plans change abruptly when his mother calls him and gently but firmly tells him it’s time to come home. Managing to squeak on a last-minute flight, he gets to the airport in time to see the plane grounded, but in the midst of the chaos of stranded passengers, Heath meets Cara, a quirky accountant and problem-solver who is also trying to get back to Tulsa for Christmas and fails to recognize him, much to Heath’s wry amusement. The two reroute to Chicago, where they hit a blizzard, and it’s anyone’s guess whether they’ll actually make it home in time, despite Cara’s resourcefulness and best efforts. Along the way, Heath finds himself drawing strength from and enjoying the forced company of his fellow holiday vagabond, and by the end of the bizarre journey, he is pretty sure he can’t live without her. Now, if only he can convince her he’s worth the risk, it just might be the best Christmas ever. Shackleford—mother of country music superstar Blake Shelton—joins with celebrity collaborator Thrasher to create a storyline around Shelton’s Christmas ballad of the same name. A kind of homage to tried-and-true country song elements—the star who drinks too much, the escape from the big city to the purity of nature and home, the refreshingly normal girl-next-door heroine who knows a relationship with The Big Star will never work—combined with a Planes, Trains & Automobiles, everything-that-can-go-wrong-will sensibility.
Nothing great or earth shattering, but a sweet, if clichéd, romantic Christmas tale that will warm some hearts. Fans of country star Blake Shelton and his author-mother take note.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-46837-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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