Despite a flawed ending, this deeply felt tale delivers a vivid and unflinching look at postpartum depression, marriage,...
A woman of the early 20th century struggles for self-determination in the face of unexpected love, unimaginable loss, and the stigma of a little-understood mental illness.
In this historical novel by nonfiction author Notbohm (The Autism Trail Guide, 2014, etc.), 26-year-old Annie Rushton leaves home after her abusive mother’s death in 1911, seven years after her own violent episode of postpartum psychosis. That incident culminated in a shattering divorce and the loss of Annie’s parental rights to her then-infant daughter. (“The law is meted out by men,” says a not-unsympathetic judge.) Annie joins her older brother on his homestead in Montana with hopes for a fresh start and soon marries dynamic salesman-turned-farmer Adam Fielding. Their heated passion for each other and their drive for economic success bond them; their mutual desire for a child eventually frays that link. After each miscarriage and after the death of an infant daughter, Annie loses herself to long bouts of severe depression and psychosis. Although there is no divorce, the marriage essentially ends when, during her last pregnancy, Annie is court-ordered to be committed to a mental asylum. Notbohm’s character-driven narrative, spanning more than two decades, is both graceful and unflinching. Annie’s haunting and revelatory dreams, a recurring device, deepen readers’ insights into her psyche. The fecundity of the land (“flat and fertile, ringed by cottonwoods and the opaque Milk River, with its curious lightened-tea tint”) provides a stark contrast to Annie’s brutal miscarriages with their “slaughterhouse” smell. In the descriptions of the disintegration of the marriage, Adam’s emotional unraveling is given authentic weight, as is the societal condemnation Annie faces and the male-dominated legal and medical view of postpartum depression as a moral failing or “madness.” The author doesn’t sugarcoat Annie’s episodes of near catatonia and manic rage or her subsequent road to self-determination, a complex journey of grief, fulfillment, betrayal, and forgiveness. The one defect is the story’s ending: a too-pat catharsis wrapped in self-conscious, poetic sentiment. The book’s title, inspired by Thoreau and the constellation Pegasus, refers to the quilt Annie designs for Adam as a groom’s gift, a recurring, bittersweet symbol of intimate memories, hopes for the future, and, ultimately, absolution.
Despite a flawed ending, this deeply felt tale delivers a vivid and unflinching look at postpartum depression, marriage, love, and death in the early 1900s.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-335-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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