Miller (Brand New Human Being, 2012) is refreshing in her approach to abortion, but too many coincidences and parallels in...
This earnest domestic drama set on Cape Cod covers all three bases of family relationships—siblings, spouses, parents and children—as well as the left field of uncle and nieces.
When he finds himself jobless, homeless, and single, 42-year-old Vance comes to stay in the childhood home where his twin brother, Craig, still lives with his second wife, Gina, their two young children, and Craig’s 17-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Amanda. Vance, the seemingly more sensitive if less responsible brother, envies and resents straight-arrow Craig’s relative success, but no one in this family is happy or exactly likable, and each harbors a store of secrets, guilt, moral dilemmas, and resentments. More than $250,000 in debt, builder Craig is desperately counting on two not-quite-solid projects to bail himself out. He also still blames himself for the death of Amanda’s mother in a diving accident 11 years ago. Gina, a Harvard grad with design aspirations, is dissatisfied merely running a boutique. Frustrated in her marriage to uncommunicative Craig, she's tempted into flirtation with the twins’ longtime friend Dov, who plans to have Craig build his new restaurant. The biggest secret of all, and the one that affects everyone eventually, is held by Amanda. Already accepted to Dartmouth (natch, in this novel full of Ivy Leaguers and rich-people problems), she was caught smoking pot at school after her boyfriend, incidentally Dov’s son, dumped her; instead of being expelled, she was sent to Chile, where she met a guy and got “in trouble.” She’s desperate not to be pregnant, but her father is against abortion for reasons from his youth that he is not sharing. Meanwhile, Vance runs into his old high school girlfriend, coincidentally the riding teacher of his poignantly underappreciated 6-year-old niece, Helen, and the guilty secret that has haunted him since their breakup surfaces.
Miller (Brand New Human Being, 2012) is refreshing in her approach to abortion, but too many coincidences and parallels in plot and character connections weaken the novel.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-547-73441-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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