An initially intriguing but ultimately disappointing effort.
A stranger comes to town, upsetting the heretofore placid lives of a couple.
Providence, R.I., is the setting for what at first blush appears to be a standard tale of two yuppies struggling to maintain their bourgeois bonhomie against an increasingly unforgiving urban landscape. Owen, 40, and his wife of six years, Mira, live in the house where she grew up, which became hers when her parents were killed in a car accident. Mira runs a private art school which is perennially short of cash. Owen teaches in a doomed public school and tries to instill hope in his students. When Wilton, a former sitcom star, moves into the adjacent house, his first act is to hijack Owen’s and Mira’s daily routine. Soon, contributing gourmet staples bought with his Hollywood wealth, he’s sharing most meals with the couple. He’s moved from LA to Providence hoping to bond with his long-estranged daughter, Anya. All three principals harbor a secret shame. Thanks to Owen’s cowardice, his girlfriend was killed in a restaurant shooting. Mira’s father was having an affair with her mother’s best friend. Wilton came close to crashing his car with toddler Anya in it. Wilton’s advent sparks a strange triangulation, sowing distrust between Mira and Owen as to whose friend he really is. Mira and Wilton start spending evenings at the casino. Wilton and Owen trade confidences. Minor characters play out the themes of disconnection and attachment, New England style, including Owen’s father, a recluse who lives on a pond with several cats until he’s rescued by a condo-dwelling matriarch. Mira’s gambling, predictably, becomes an addiction. As Anya circumspectly approaches Wilton, discord between Mira and Owen escalates until, too abruptly, Owen is contemplating violent solutions to his soured relationships. Although the prose is competent enough, it often serves more as atmospheric filler than as a vehicle for elucidating the characters’ myriad dilemmas. The action, instead of building to a satisfying conclusion, merely unravels.
An initially intriguing but ultimately disappointing effort.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-218402-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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