Those quirky Southerners with their great affection for past high school glory and old-time religion are back. Sure, we've seen it all before, but with this estimable if occasionally sketchy novel, Owen (Littlejohn, 1992) demonstrates that the Southern gothic staples can still yield satisfaction. Nancy is signing and reading from her new book when someone asks whether it is based on personal experience, and, in the type of temporal displacement indicated in the movies by a dissolve, she flashes back to 1971. At that time, her silent second husband, Sam, suddenly insists on leaving Richmond, Va., for his hometown of Monacan. While not geographically far from Richmond, Monacan is psychologically light-years distant. It's the rural South, where the aspiring novelist contends with Sam's awkward family, including his Uncle Lot, who believes that the moss and faded paint on his barn have created an image of Jesus on the cross. In short, creepy first-person segments, Lot explains that he has been dreaming of snacking on ``fat lightning,'' a flammable wood used for kindling; that he has a sawdust pile that has been burning continuously for close to six years; and that he has hooked up with an inspirational African-American preacher who wants to organize ``The Chapel of Jesus-on-the-Barn.'' Meanwhile, at her tenth high-school reunion (where she observes that her peers are ``split down the middle by the '60s,'' half of them still conservative and half of them changed), Nancy meets up with her ex-husband and finds that she is still attracted to him. At the same time, she discovers that her unassuming second husband has been acting out some high-school fantasies of his own. While Lot's crazy acts can feel forced, Nancy is convincing as a smart semi-renegade who challenges the Presbyterian minister's wife when she wants to drop The Catcher in the Rye from the high-school reading list. Loopy and darkly comic, if sporadically out of control.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-877946-41-9
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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.
