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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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