A stifling, dismaying tale of upper-class dysfunction elegantly told.
Enid Campbell never wanted to marry, but her aristocratic family needs an heir—and after her brother is killed in World War I, it falls to Enid to produce one. This pressure will lead to cascades of unhappiness down the generations.
Poisoned, splintered relationships characterize this saga of upper-class life in 1920s Britain, radiating outward from the fallible Enid, whose discomfort as a daughter, sister, and mother dominates events. Favored by her father, who also died early, Enid makes a questionable marriage to Douglas, “a nobody, a nothing,” and then has a son, Fagus, who's "born with something wrong with him" and becomes an invalid after falling down the stairs, turning the child into “the living breathing embodiment of everything she’d done wrong.” Loveless though her marriage is, Enid stays in it to provide a fully able heir, although she would rather be a nun or devote herself to her Christian Science beliefs. Two more children are born, but the pressure and postnatal depression are too much, and Enid flees, leaving her sister, Joan, and Joan's "companion," Pat, to step in. Anstruther’s debut, a fictionalized version of her own family’s history, is a dark story of close relationships gone awry. Enid’s stony, withering mother, Sybil, was always closer to Joan; Enid believes Joan hates her; Enid’s daughter, Finetta, believes her mother hates her and neglects her own daughter in turn while feeling crushing love for her son. For all the sophistication of tone and expression to be found in the book, the familial relationships emerge naked, brutal—and gender biased. Anstruther depicts a privileged world that offers little in the way of human warmth and a group of characters almost uniformly miserable despite their material comfort. It makes for a chilly read, its gloom only deepened by a running 1964 episode in which an elderly Enid is confronted by the measure of her failure.
A stifling, dismaying tale of upper-class dysfunction elegantly told.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-12085-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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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