Palatable lies that, once digested, potentially reveal some unpalatable truths, not unlike ads.
An infertile advertising executive leaves IKEA with another woman’s baby and, despite “promises to the universe,” keeps her.
When a co-worker suggested “visualization” after Lucy Wakefield’s unsuccessful fertility treatments, Lucy furnished a nursery. Her husband, suspecting she’d never move on, left her. When Lucy spots a baby slumped in an IKEA cart, she’s overcome. “I can honestly say that my only intention in reaching into the cart was to right the baby. But as soon as I pressed my palms against her doughy arms, I felt a force so strong I can still feel the bind in my chest.” She tells herself they’ll just get some fresh air but goes home and names the child Mia. From the beginning readers know she doesn’t get away with it forever. The novel is told in first-person chapters from the points of view of Lucy; Mia’s biological mother, Marilyn; Mia when she’s 21; and several more people—some have a cameo, others get many chapters. It’s never clear who they’re speaking to, which adds to the strangeness. Marilyn moves to northern California and gets into yoga and crystals; she’s a little too perfectly positioned to help Mia heal from “bad energy” when she discovers the truth. Lucy sets up that discovery in a fairly unbelievable way, then escapes immediate repercussions through another unreal plot twist. All of this is consistent with the improbable premise that an otherwise successful, stable woman would help herself to a stranger’s baby. But suspending disbelief when reading well-written fiction can be pleasant. Ross’ prose is both readable and enjoyable, and she touches on interesting ideas about identity, family, and the malleability of the human psyche.
Palatable lies that, once digested, potentially reveal some unpalatable truths, not unlike ads.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3235-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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 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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