Repetitions from the previous book and the sometimes-artless echoes of the artist’s grieving inflate and mar what is still...
The question here is how to go on after the death of a loved one with a life so seemingly empty yet still filled with family, friends, and the remnants of years devoted to art.
In this painful sequel to the author’s Renato, the Painter (2012), etc., and the fourth book featuring the Cavalu-Stillamare clan, the artist at 83 confronts the loss of Alba, his beloved wife, a woman with whom he first made love when he was 17. After a plaintive opening lament, “this defective memoir,” written three to four years after the death, tells of how Renato joined the clan as a foundling, one of many passages that largely repeat material from the previous book. Then he returns briefly to the 20 hours of painful torment Alba suffered until death came before shifting again to the succor of other memories, of childhood, family gatherings, and how the family and one’s circle of friends have changed with the passage of time. Grief is an awful thing, and Mirabelli conveys it sometimes awkwardly, as when a paragraph consists of the word “Die” repeated 120 times in Renato’s verbal bid to join his wife. Other times the author is touching and persuasive, as in the inventory of “all her little private things” in a purse he finds while disposing of Alba’s clothing. Renato finds comfort with family and friends and then a new friendship with a barista who lost her husband to brain cancer. What he doesn’t do is paint, something he couldn’t not do in the previous book. But art won’t let him go. A major exhibition begins to take shape, revealing a chance yet for healing a deeply wounded heart.
Repetitions from the previous book and the sometimes-artless echoes of the artist’s grieving inflate and mar what is still an affecting look at memory, loss, and love.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62054-026-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: McPherson & Company
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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