Young’s intricately wrought family drama tarries over details of time, place, and emotion as it gradually reveals her...
A family home hides generations of secrets.
The estate Lucy Evans leaves to her great-niece, Justine, includes a lakeside house, a portfolio of $150,000, and a composition book in which Lucy recorded events from the summer of 1935. Lucy’s great-grandfather, who co-founded Williamsburg, Minnesota, with other escapees from the coal mines of Wales, built the summer house. By the time Lucy writes in her notebook, she’s been living there alone since the death of her older sister, Lilith—Justine's grandmother—three years earlier. Lucy wants Justine to know the truth about the disappearance of her and Lilith's 6-year-old sister, Emily, many years earlier. Their pious father, who revered innocence; their overly protective mother, who slept in Emily’s bed every night and didn’t want her out of her sight; and the rebellious, aptly named Lilith all find echoes in a parallel narrative about Justine's life. Deciding to do what she swore she’d never do, Justine uproots her two daughters from San Diego and the only home they’ve known to escape her manipulative, needy lover and claim her inheritance after Lucy’s death. Justine’s mother, who, as Lilith’s daughter, is just as free a spirit as her mother was, spent most of her life shaking the dust of a series of towns off her feet and dragged her daughter along with her for years. Now Justine’s chance to own a family home—even though she’s visited it just once—promises to provide the stability she never knew as a child. But she’s unprepared for life in a cold, musty house in a cold, isolated area with only two neighbors, an unsettling pair of elderly brothers who played their parts in a tragedy that threatens to repeat itself with Justine’s daughters.
Young’s intricately wrought family drama tarries over details of time, place, and emotion as it gradually reveals her debut’s tragic core.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-245660-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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