A spiritual guidebook that encompasses a sentimental love story, or vice versa.
A parable for those who prefer spiritual quests to be lightened by whimsy.
Kincaid (A Dog Named Christmas, 2008, etc.), a practicing lawyer, has attracted a popular readership with heartwarming stories and happy endings. This novel finds him extending his approach into the metaphysical realm, exploring some of life’s eternal questions and mysteries, though his breezy style and conversation-heavy narrative doesn’t require a lot of effort on the reader's part. Much of the interplay is as cute as the novel’s title. The aptly named Angel, a Lakota woman who serves as the protagonist’s spiritual guide, explains that the “coconuts” are a panreligious group of like-minded seekers: “Getting to the milky essence of life isn’t that easy, but it’s the whole point. You have to crack the hairy, hard outer shell of the self. A coconut is a metaphor for the spiritual journey.” Her unlikely disciple is Ted Day, a middle-aged lawyer who knows that something is missing from his life but has to be coaxed out of his routine to find it. The two meet on the road by accident (literally) and decide that he will be her first client in her role as “a sort of traveling spiritual consultant” while he tries to help her aunt beat a murder rap. Along the way, they travel to meet a Catholic priest, a Muslim advocate and a Buddhist author, having long conversations with each and with each other, with footnotes pointing the reader to spiritual books referenced and/or recommended. Though the “tantric” of the title refers to nothing sexual, Ted must inevitably confront a crucial dilemma: “Would the pursuit of the lesser goal of romance thwart the greater goal of enlightenment?” The answer will surprise no one, for once Ted has found his Angel, the author isn’t about to have him let her go.
A spiritual guidebook that encompasses a sentimental love story, or vice versa.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-95199-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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