A first novel as testimony to a mother’s hell—without transcendence.
Motherhood sinks to an all-time low in Boehringer’s bleak debut, set in the soulless suburbs of South Florida.
Meg O’Hara, a young mother of two, accidentally hits and kills her 27-month-old son, Jordan, as she is pulling into her driveway in her SUV while the father, Paul, is distracted ogling the neighbor in her short-shorts. After this nightmarish start, the only move toward redemption for these unlovable characters is in engendering the reader’s sympathy, but Boehringer rejects that route. Instead, she compounds Meg’s erratic behavior as her guilt almost kills her. Meg harbors deep suspicions about her husband’s fidelity, especially when the suspect neighbor, Susie, seems always to be at their house. Meg herself is the product of an alcoholic mother whose drunken behavior caused the car accident that killed Meg’s father and brother. Now, Meg decides to quit her job as an actuary and, first, spend the day finding things for her and her 11-month-old daughter, Madeline, to do, such as join a self-help group of parents of children with cancer—after a group of parents with dead children rejects her. She drives around a lot with Maddie—like, 58 times slowly through the neighborhood in order to monitor any accidents, then hangs out at the airport bar (with Maddie) drinking wine, where she meets a sympathetic man, Al, whom she considers sleeping with. After witnessing another accident—literally in her front yard—and failing to revive the victim, who happens to be Susie’s married lover, Meg (with Maddie) takes up sneaking into Susie’s house and feeling comforted by her tidy surroundings. As Meg grows more deeply confused, her marriage with conflicted, blameworthy Paul deteriorates. Boehringer seems committed to making Meg sound as ungracious and nasty as possible, her very prose sarcastic;moreover, and Meg’s litany about her unfitness as a mother rings hollow, since the author offers little emotional context for the hand-wringing.
A first novel as testimony to a mother’s hell—without transcendence.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2005
ISBN: 1-85242-893-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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