The whole sepia-toned caravan, in fact, is so relaxed that even the most violent felonies may leave you smiling. Leonard’s...
Leonard’s 40th novel sweetly revisits the Depression, when every Oklahoma kid dreamed of growing up to be a lawman or a gangster.
The hot kid is Carl (né Carlos) Webster, a young U.S. marshal out of Tulsa with so much fire in his belly that some folks wonder if he actually enjoys killing bad guys. But the sobriquet could apply just as easily to Jack Belmont, a wildcat oilman’s son whose idea of a good time is raping an underaged girl, blackmailing his father about Nancy Polis, the mistress he’s keeping in Sapulpa, and kidnapping Nancy when the old man brushes off the extortion attempt. Or even to Tony Antonelli, an Okmulgee reporter who finds his true calling when he shakes the facts from his feet and goes to work for True Detective Mystery determined to chronicle the adventures of Carl and Jack. The antagonists oblige by tangling again and again over a period from 1927 to 1934, swapping women, preening remarks, schemes and occasionally bullets. Along the way, there are bloody tangles with bank robbers, soiled law-enforcers, Klansmen, Kansas City ward-heelers, and aspiring gun molls like Louly Brown as wholehearted in their auditions as if they were aiming for Hollywood stardom—as in a sense they are. Although the body count is high, Carl and Jack emerge from each encounter as unscathed as Kabuki warriors, ready each time for a rematch for which they’re more motivated than ever. Their persistent efforts to turn themselves into mythic heroes in the manner of Pretty Boy Floyd, the talismanic celebrity gangster forever just out of Louly’s reach, echoes Bonnie and Clyde. But Leonard’s sly take on the price of notoriety is a lot more genial and laid-back.
The whole sepia-toned caravan, in fact, is so relaxed that even the most violent felonies may leave you smiling. Leonard’s gentle epic is as restorative as a month in the country.Pub Date: May 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-072422-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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