Women may not be able to have it all, but this novel can.
What happens when a book lover gets caught up in the tech world?
Alice Pearse is happy with her life as the part-time books editor at You, a glossy women’s magazine, which allows her to commute into Manhattan three days a week wearing semifashionable clothes and still have time to hang out with her kids, go to spin class, and grab coffee with friends. But when her husband, Nicholas, finds out he hasn’t made partner at his law firm—and cements his decision to leave by throwing a laptop across the conference room—she impetuously tells him she’ll get a full-time job. Luckily, she soon hears from Genevieve Andrews, a woman she follows on Twitter, who offers her a position at Scroll, a sort-of Amazon/Starbucks mashup that wants to revolutionize the world of bookselling. Egan’s voice is knowing and funny, and she has a great eye for the minutiae of the modern working mother’s life. Alice picks Legos off the floor, orders her kids’ class pictures, and calls in a renewal of her dog’s Prozac prescription: “His birthday? Honestly, I have no idea….He’s not my son! He’s my dog!” The scenes at the tech company aren’t as sharply satirical as Dave Eggers’ The Circle, but it’s fun to see Alice try to get a handle on the lingo—learning to schedule a 1-to-1 instead of a meeting, for instance—and keep up with the company’s shifting priorities. The book is brimming with relationships and subplots: Alice’s father is dying of cancer but finds time to nag her about her social media profile (“Why no cover photo on your [Facebook] timeline?”); her best friend, an independent bookstore owner, is struggling with her business; Nicholas is drinking too much while trying to get his solo practice off the ground. Egan, herself the books editor at Glamour, packs an incredible amount of humor, observation, and insight into her buoyant debut novel, a sort-of The Way We Live Now for 21st-century moms who grew up loving the bookish heroines of Anne of Green Gables and Betsy-Tacy.
Women may not be able to have it all, but this novel can.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0543-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
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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