An accretion of exquisite moments.
A soulful fictional homage to a beloved Antarctic vessel, from Australian author Parrett (Past the Shallows, 2014).
The red-hulled Antarctic supply ship Nella Dan, like its fictional counterpart, was decommissioned and sunk in the mid-1980s after running aground on the sub-Antarctic island of Macquarie. In Parrett’s second novel, the Nella Dan brings together, however temporarily, a broken Australian family and a Danish sailor. Teenager Isla, her unnamed younger brother and her mother (known only as Mum) move to Hobart, Tasmania. The implication is that Mum has left the children’s father. (The precise nature of the domestic difficulties will emerge but is not the main focus here.) Watching as Nella Dan docks in Hobart, Isla notices a man on deck waving to her. From there, a series of vignettes narrated in turn by Isla and the man who waved—Bo, the ship's chief cook—reveal in small, earthy details how kind people can be. Somehow Bo meets Mum, and while he's in port, he tries to be a father to her children. He shows them how to shell walnuts with a pocketknife, introduces them to the warm delights of Nella Dan’s kitchen, gives Mum cooking tips, and encourages Isla, as she enters high school, to pursue science. From the ship’s logs we learn the progress of the Nella Dan as she transports personnel to and from an Antarctic research station, making frequent stops in Hobart, and spends weeks trapped in ice. Although all hands survive Nella Dan’s final mishap, she is scuttled by her owners. Bo—who, like his father before him, joined Nella Dan’s crew as a teenager—is a gentle giant, and Mum, though apparently grateful for the help and companionship, is too damaged by her history to let him join her family. All these facts are approached obliquely, without any trace of sentimentality. Although the specter of child endangerment does arise—the brother is menaced by a white van, a young schoolmate is hit by a car—Parrett’s emphasis is on the opposite: child nurturing in whatever unexpected guise it may occur.
An accretion of exquisite moments.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5489-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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