A sentence-level marvel burdened with too many layers.
Two orphaned adults try to make sense of their father’s sudden death and their own grief.
Australian author Jones’ (A Guide to Berlin, 2015, etc.) new novel begins with a funeral. The eponymous Noah Glass, a 67-year-old art historian, is dead—found floating in his apartment complex’s swimming pool. His adult children, Martin and Evie, come together to mourn their father’s death and make sense of a shocking revelation: A famous sculpture is missing, and Noah is the prime suspect. In the aftermath of the funeral, Martin travels to seedy yet historic Palermo, Italy, to trace his father’s footsteps and solve the mystery; Evie moves into Noah’s apartment and tries to figure out her next steps. They work through their grief apart but together—over grainy Skype calls and through their childhood memories and respective traumas. Weaving together multiple narratives (Noah’s, Martin’s, and Evie’s), the novel sketches a family portrait full of love, loss, and regret. At times, the novel can feel weighed down by the overwhelming number of references to film, art history, and Australian and Italian history. Long stretches of the book seem tedious despite Jones’ emotional and stunning meditations on grief, knowledge, and memory. If there are issues with the plotting or pacing, Jones’ writing helps take the sting out. She distills complicated emotions and imagery and renders them beautifully: “the incandescent light falling like seawater over their small bent backs” and “clunky air conditioners stuck to their sides like ticks.” There are wonderful subplots—Evie takes a job describing films to a blind man; Martin struggles with his ex-wife over their daughter—that are far more satisfying than the crime at the novel’s center. The way Martin and Evie traverse their complex relationship in the wake of Noah’s death is a particular strength; their journey feels real and earned.
A sentence-level marvel burdened with too many layers.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-925603-40-8
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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