Nagy mixes narrative modes and tones (and generations) nimbly; it's rare to see suspense and literary lyricism woven...
An unusual and compelling debut: a vast, ambitious intergenerational family saga that takes place in a brief time frame (three days) and a remote setting.
That would be Seven Island, off Maine's rugged coast, and for nearly two centuries (the novel takes place in 1964, mid–Cold War) the playground for two wealthy families, the Hillsingers and the Quicks, who are deeply entwined yet insist on—revel in—their separateness, living in the island's two grand houses and "mingl[ing] when necessary or appropriate, but rarely with any warmth." Connections have become even more strained and Byzantine in the current generation: Jim Hillsinger and Billy Quick married socialite sisters, so their children are cousins, and, after Billy's wife Hannah's death four years earlier, Lila Hillsinger temporarily took a more intimate role in the lives of her nieces and her brother-in-law. The immediate occasion is "the Migration," the annual summer departure of the sheep of Seven for a neighboring island and its vaunted clover, an event around which elaborate ceremonies have developed. The plot Nagy builds onto this is flabbergastingly complex and fascinating: Jim is a CIA officer recently cashiered because he was suspected of treason...a suspicion that emerged from his efforts to save his sister-in-law, briefly a communist fellow traveler, from public humiliation in the McCarthyite heyday. Meanwhile there's a gorgeous subplot that has to do with Hillsinger's decision (he's egged on by his aged father, one of several indelibly drawn minor characters) to banish his 12-year-old son, Catta, to wild, impassable Baffin Island for a 24-hour period—a brutal rite of passage that Lila has forbidden. The cast is huge, the plot sometimes diffuse, the transitions a bit whipsawing, and there's a small false note at the end...but mostly this novel is a surprising delight.
Nagy mixes narrative modes and tones (and generations) nimbly; it's rare to see suspense and literary lyricism woven together so well.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-841-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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