by Elena Maria Vidal ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2014
An imaginative, meticulously told history that will especially appeal to those with Irish roots.
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An Irish immigrant builds a new life in Canada, the decades marked by marriage, children and the odd otherworldly encounter.
Vidal (Madame Royale, 2010, etc.) successfully transforms family stories into a historical novel that chronicles the life of her great-great-great-grandfather Daniel O’Connor, who established a homestead in Ontario in the 19th century. O’Connor, a blacksmith living in County Cork, Ireland, is frustrated in his desire to train as a doctor because of English laws restricting Catholics’ religious freedom and economic chances. When the political activities of his wild younger brother Owen cast suspicion on O’Connor, he flees Ireland, carrying just two mementos of his homeland—a white rosebush uprooted by his mother and a “paradise tree,” a wooden crucifix so called because it represents a ladder of suffering to climb to heaven. Nine years later, he has carved Long Point farm out of the wilderness, creating a home despite the new continent’s own anti-Catholic prejudice. He marries Brigit, a girl 18 years younger than he is, then almost loses her to Owen, who arrives at the farm after his own midnight departure from Eire. But when a vision of his mother appears to him, hands on hips, he finds the will to throw his brother out of the house and confront his bride. She sobs and swears she will die of shame, insisting, “ ‘Oh, yes, I will die. I will,’ she choked. ‘But fret not....I’ll be getting over it.’ ” And she does, bearing 11 children. The novel follows them as they grow to adulthood, marry and have children of their own, with each section of the book told through the eyes of a different character. Though the story unwinds slowly, it never drags.
An imaginative, meticulously told history that will especially appeal to those with Irish roots.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500656027
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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