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IN THE ORCHARD

An obsessive ode to the maternal, simultaneously poetic and stifling.

Mere weeks after giving birth, a distracted mother named Maisie Moore visits a pick-your-own farm with her husband and children.

Rapturous in its celebration of fecundity (including plentiful details of breastfeeding and C-sections), of nature and the rhythms of birth and life, Minot’s third novel takes a more laid-back attitude to plot. Instead, her narrative is packed with the considerations of parenting—discussed among women at playgrounds; encouraged by Maisie’s grandmother, whose hard-drinking husband died young; pondered ceaselessly by Maisie herself, both as an inexperienced younger mother and now a more capable one with four children. The novel, focused on a single day in the life of Maisie and her family, is almost action-free while utterly inhabited by thoughts, memories, speculations, dreams, and observations on these themes. The family—including Maisie; kindly husband Neil; 8-year-old Xavier; Harriet, age 6; Romeo, 3; and newborn Esme—does leave home for its annual apple-picking excursion, permitting a change of scene. And Maisie is also preoccupied by one other thing—the family’s precarious finances—although details of this vast debt remain unspecified and unexplained. But at the apple farm, the larger focus remains much the same: the behavior of other parents and passersby, often in reaction to Maisie’s brood; considerations of marriage, birth, healing, and growing, as symbolized by the grafts on the fruit trees; premature deaths of mothers and infants. Looping tirelessly round babies, bodies, love, and money (is life “what emerges out of life?”), Minot’s text is variously descriptive, perceptive, heartfelt, fanciful, banal, and sentimental (“I lub you, Mumma”), concluding, after Maisie has disturbing encounters with two older women, somewhere ethereal and rhapsodic yet tinged with danger.

An obsessive ode to the maternal, simultaneously poetic and stifling.

Pub Date: April 25, 2023

ISBN: 9780593535929

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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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