The “very long reach of war” transcends generations.
Three women struggle to heal after the trauma of war.
Novelist and award-winning journalist Benedict (Sand Queen, 2011, etc.) continues her focus on the Iraq War, the theme of her previous novel, in a bleak, affecting tale set in a cheerless town in upstate New York. The story begins in August, when the air is sticky, the sky ominous, and a life-changing hurricane is about to arrive. “It smells wrong,” 9-year-old Juney says. Juney, who's blind, is the daughter of Rin Drummond, a single mother who served in Iraq, where her husband was killed. As a sergeant, she was called Dragon Drummond, “tough as boot leather and mean as a rattrap,” qualities now intensified by rage. Surrounding her home with fences and barbed wire, she arms herself with rifles, M4 carbines, and an ample supply of ammunition; and she raises three wolves, wild creatures with an instinct for self-protection like her own. At the local Veterans Affairs hospital, Rin encounters Naema, who was a medical student in Sand Queen and now is a pediatrician. Naema has a facial scar from shrapnel, surface evidence of deep emotional wounds: her husband, because he was an interpreter for the American Army, was “atomized into a cloud of blood” by a bomb that also took off half the leg of her young son, Tariq. After fleeing from Iraq and spending years as a refugee, Naema sees her work for the VA as an effort “to undo the war” by healing children hurt “by this terrible inhumanity.” The novel’s third protagonist is Beth, the wife of a Marine who has served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving Beth to raise their rebellious son by herself. Lonely, Beth turns to drink to numb her pain; the war infuses every moment of these women’s lives. Benedict creates a tender friendship between Tariq and Juney; although they, too, are victims of war, they have emerged as loving, intuitive, and wise. Their kindness toward one another is a rare glimmer of light in a desolate landscape.
The “very long reach of war” transcends generations.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-942658-30-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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