A playful look at Jewish coming-of-age and coming-to-terms in the American West.
In a comic debut, the lives of five characters come undone at a remote Colorado summer camp.
It takes more than 300 pages for first-time novelist Abel to reveal the meaning of her title, delivered in the baritone of melancholy Ira Silver, who has shuttered his radical left newspaper: “Maybe everybody has one decade, call it an optimistic decade, when the world feels malleable and the self strong.” Twelve pages later, his wife and partner, Georgia, succinctly disagrees: “Such typical Ira bullshit, creating a universal theory out of his own personal malaise.” The recipient of this yin and yang commentary is their daughter, Rebecca, a Berkeley undergraduate, late to her own coming-of-age party. As the novel begins, Ira mystifies Rebecca by ordering her to a high-altitude summer camp: “He’d never given her a gift of any kind before, material or experiential.” The destination, called Llamalo, is run by her charismatic cousin, Caleb, “his name the birdsong of this place.” He tells campers “Llamalo is an invitation to act differently, to be someone new. How often do you get that chance?” Caleb is a bit of a hustler; he bought the failing spread of a small cattle farmer, Don Talc, and his son, Donnie, whose resentment at losing the land morphs into a kind of Cliven Bundy–style rage. Abel is excellent at class resentment and its signifiers—Caleb cleans out the faltering town’s clothes and tools and figurines at auction for camp costumes and art projects. Abel writes in larking, pleasurable sentences, letting each protagonist—including David Cohen, devoted camper and Rebecca’s childhood friend—wrestle with loneliness and horniness and purpose. The story moves across one summer in the early 1990s, with short, clever flashbacks to the Reagan-era 1980s. But the pacing is off: Very little happens in the first third and too much is crammed into the last stretch.
A playful look at Jewish coming-of-age and coming-to-terms in the American West.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61620-630-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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