Although the insights are sometimes too explicit, Kaplan’s stories confidently, capably explore the switchbacks of human...
Relationships—flawed, ruptured, secret, evolving—are sifted and scrutinized in this latest collection from Kaplan (The Tell, 2013, etc.).
Several of the eight stories collected here are set in the author's hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. The first story (and title tale) sets the tone with an economical portrait of the crises in Alice’s 10-year marriage to a man who is “proud, boastful, know-it-all, sometimes a bully” and who is enraging their community with plans to build a waterfront home that will destroy the classic vista from a revered artist’s historic homestead. Alice’s compromised response is echoed in “The School of Politics,” where museum director Francine reconnects with the “criminal, thug, intimidator” she once dated and who is now the mayor of her city and on trial for corruption. Kaplan’s insights into the waxing and waning of marital arrangements have their quirky side. Hollis, who breaks a tooth at the start of “The Aerialist,” returns to his old, none-too-gentle dentist, whose daughter, a trapeze artist, helps unlock the tension in Hollis' latest relationship. In “Companion Animal,” a husband whose single instance of infidelity has exposed his hollow marriage moves into shabby new digs and begins to understand some of the relationship deals we make. Children often play a role as game-changer, like the pregnant stepdaughter in “Lovesick” who reveals the truth behind an infertile marriage. The final, longest story is a departure, following two unattuned colleagues at a deserted private school who reluctantly link up in the face of the apocalypse. This narrative also hinges on a child and secrets declared, but its departure into horror and mortality sits oddly with the more familiar domestic upheavals that have gone before.
Although the insights are sometimes too explicit, Kaplan’s stories confidently, capably explore the switchbacks of human interaction.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935439-90-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
