In finely wrought prose, with characters who seem to walk beside us and speak aloud, Segal’s latest novel is a sympathetic...
A novel about the trials and tribulations of family life.
Gwen is unhappy about her mother’s new relationship. After her father died, several years back, the now-teenage Gwen and her mother, Julia, were on their own, just the two of them. Now there’s not only a man to deal with, for all intents and purposes a stepfather, but also a stepbrother, and they’ve all moved into Julia’s London town house together. Segal’s (The Innocents, 2012) latest effort is a moving, funny, and surprisingly gripping story about love and guilt and family life and teenagers. She moves adroitly between points of view so that we see Gwen’s perspective but also Julia’s, James’ (Julia’s beau), and Nathan’s (James’ son)—sometimes within the space of a few paragraphs. At the beginning, Gwen and Nathan can’t stand each other: Gwen is an artistic, indifferent student, while Nathan studies intensely, his gaze set on Oxford. They tease and provoke each other, and the atmosphere of the house is, to say the least, tense. After a while, though, something shifts between them, and Nathan and Gwen grow closer and—to their parents’ horror—closer. What happens next might be somewhat predictable, but that doesn’t make the story any less riveting. Gwen is faced with a choice that will determine not only her own life, but also the lives of the whole household. Throughout all this, Segal’s prose is clear and precise and the novel is so engrossing it’s hard to put down. Despite all their fine intentions, Julia and James can’t help placing extra blame for their situation on the other’s child; each sympathizes with his or her own offspring. There are no clear answers here—not because there is no right or wrong but because family life is messy and teenagers even messier.
In finely wrought prose, with characters who seem to walk beside us and speak aloud, Segal’s latest novel is a sympathetic portrait of the difficulties in finding love and raising teenagers.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-57645-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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