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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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