A solid debut, though its redemption arc is predictable comfort food.
A family man is tested by his father’s death, his wife’s emotional distance and his son’s exasperating behavior—and the crush he’s nursing on his widowed stepmom isn’t helping.
As Miller’s debut novel opens, narrator Logan Pyle is just barely keeping it together as a stay-at-home dad. His 4-year-old son, Owen, has become increasingly closed-off and rude. His lawyer wife, Julie, is little help, working long hours on a case involving ailing miners. And he’s feeling pressured to sell the valuable Montana lakefront land his late father left him. Cue some heavy-handed symbolism (Logan stocking life preservers in a boating shop on the property) and a few scenes driven by Logan’s fuming at helicopter moms and wealthy know-it-all dads, and it’s clear a crisis is coming. Sure enough, he catches Julie flirting heavily with another man, prompting him to take Owen on an impromptu road trip to visit Bennie, the young widow of Logan’s father. The two work through their own history (including a drunken flirtation that went too far) and Logan’s crumbling marriage, speeding up a long-avoided reckoning with the past. Miller is at her best in scenes with Logan and Owen together—dad’s brutal honesty with his son about death in general (and Owen’s near-death experience in particular) exposes the depths of his emotional frustration. The sexual tension between Logan and Bennie is convincing, and the first-person-present narration gives the novel a breezy energy. Even so, stiff moments abound, as when Logan and Owen visit a church and joshingly baptize themselves, and much of the dialogue is earnestly engineered to push the chess pieces into their proper positions. The sense of manipulation increases in the closing pages, which tie the bow in a satisfying but not especially surprising way.
A solid debut, though its redemption arc is predictable comfort food.Pub Date: June 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-73436-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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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