Despite some character underdevelopment, a fine tale of lives re-examined.
Two middle-aged, ordinary Mainers have an opportunity to alter their lives through love.
Laura, a radiology technician in a small town, is a seasoned diagnostician of the benign or deadly menaces lurking within her patients, even if delivery of the good or bad news must be left to her supervising physician. The fact that she has sold herself short all her life has led to disappointments on every level, from her failure to qualify for med school to a marriage, now two decades in duration, that she essentially transacted on the rebound from her first serious love affair. When, at a conference in a Boston hotel, she meets, by chance, insurance salesman Richard, she soon sees the parallels in their lives. He too allowed strictures in his life to curtail his dreams. A domineering father prevented him from having the writing career he wanted, just when he was on the verge of entering an MFA program, accompanied by the woman he loved. He too married someone on the rebound, a woman who has proven to be just as cold and insensitive as Laura’s husband, Dan. Laura’s marriage was tolerable until Dan was downsized by Maine’s most iconic mail-order company, then forced to accept a humiliating demotion to the stockroom. As Richard and Laura share meals and drinks, their feeling of kindred spirithood grows as they recognize each other’s unique qualities, mostly having to do with the love of books, culture and English vocabulary. Turns out, Richard has been planning his escape for a while and has even spotted a Boston apartment where his future will unfurl. As passionate embraces cinch the deal, it seems that these two lost souls have lucked into a second chance—but will they dare to take it? Despite pages of self-revelatory dialogue, Richard and Laura remain ciphers who may not command enough reader identification to make us care whether their future promises new love or merely a fresh hell.
Despite some character underdevelopment, a fine tale of lives re-examined.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6633-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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