A novel with an offbeat setting, hampered by thinly written characters.
In Bois’ novel, a man’s employment in an Ontario lumber mill takes him down a dark path.
Scott Douglas lives in Espanola, a small town with a depressed economy. He’s somewhat depressed, himself; he has a poor body image, drinks too much, and battles constantly with his wife, Pam. His life brightens when Scribbly Press offers him a four-novel contract and he also gets a job at Redwood Sawmill as a security guard. But when Pam and their young son, Jake, die in a car accident, Scott is left with nothing but his work life. At the sawmill, his main task is cleaning and making hourly checks on the furnace room, also known as the Konus. His co-workers include April Deville, who spends a night in Scott’s bed after a drunken night out, and Jean-Claude, who resembles an old rat and is the senior security guard. Jean-Claude is hated and feared for his write-ups, which often get employees fired. The bickering of millwright Bob Kovalchuk and apprentice Marty Burns initially seems comical but quickly turns sour. One day, Scott’s job takes an unexpected turn when he’s knocked unconscious and framed for a murder he didn’t commit, leading to a lengthy revenge plot. Bois develops the sawmill as an intriguing setting over the course of this novel. The narrative has several distractingly repetitive moments, however, as when Pam mulls over home expenses and then reiterates those same expenses in a letter. Banal dialogue often goes on for multiple pages without appreciably furthering the plot, and characters’ motivations are often unclear; for example, April very abruptly loses interest in Scott, and Jean-Claude comes off as either pure evil or as someone who merely wants extra shifts. Overall, Scott’s downward spiral might have been more compelling if his few good qualities, such as his love of writing and his relationship with his son, were better developed.
A novel with an offbeat setting, hampered by thinly written characters.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2024
ISBN: 979-8878796873
Page Count: 407
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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