As more stories about Iraq appear, novels like Tedrowe’s, focused on the home front, will be a valuable contribution to our...
A penetrating novel about the Iraq War’s inevitable collateral damage—the lives of the mothers and wives left behind.
In 2005, Ellen Silverman barely registers the war in Iraq, ensconced in her ivory tower, working on her beloved Edith Wharton novels. But then Mike joins up. Mike Cacciarelli is her ward, a wayward kid who found a family and a legal guardianship with Ellen. Her son, Wes, is at college, and her high school daughter, Jane, is finding herself (blonde dreadlocks, fighting for causes), so Ellen is snobbishly shocked that a boy half-raised in her bookish house would enlist. The novel’s second strand follows Lacey Diaz, married to Ed, a major in the Army Reserve on his second deployment. She knows their marriage is a mistake—straight-laced Ed sneers at Lacey’s wild side—but the union offered a stepfather for her son, stability, respect. While Mike is away, Ellen writes letters about pride and fear, sending him books on the absurdity of war. But then he’s injured, sent home with a missing leg, and Ellen is devastated. While Ed’s away, Lacey begins an affair with Jim, a good guy from the old neighborhood who loves her any way she comes. Then Ed is sent back, blind and brain injured; Lacey knows this is punishment for her adultery. The harrowing second half of the novel takes place at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where Ellen and Lacey find themselves unlikely comrades in arms, negotiating the bureaucracy and sheer terror of their situation, the physical therapy and PTSD, and a future they don’t want to think about. Tedrowe’s examination of military families is honest and nuanced, and she manages to wrestle some kind of equanimity for the flawed heroes of her tale.
As more stories about Iraq appear, novels like Tedrowe’s, focused on the home front, will be a valuable contribution to our understanding of the war.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05248-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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 deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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