Though Emma’s life changes drastically, the reliance on clichés and all-too-familiar tropes makes it difficult to reach an...
Sometimes true love defies all expectations.
When Emma Montague left England behind, she embarked on a fast-paced and stressful financial career in Manhattan. Five years later, she's ready for another change in her life. After diligently saving, she has enough money set aside to pursue her dream of interior design off the beaten path in Westport, Connecticut. Though her rental house isn’t ideal, she's able to see past the hideous salmon shag carpeting and dated linoleum and imagines transforming it into her ideal beach home. Her landlord, Dominic, is confident and flirtatious, yet Emma almost immediately shuts down any possibility of viewing him as a romantic interest, insisting to others and herself that their backgrounds are too different and they simply have nothing in common. But given that he and his young son live right next door, a relationship begins to blossom. For much of the tale, Emma tries to argue herself out of a future with Dominic, worrying both about significant concerns—his son, Jesse, doesn’t appear eager to share his father’s time and affection—and her continued anxiety that their differences make them incompatible. While there are hints of conflict throughout the novel, most of those issues peter out before reaching a peak. Bestselling author Green (Summer Secrets, 2015, etc.) relies heavily on stereotypes with this offering, and the characters seem forced into creation rather than developing more authentically. The use of present-tense narration further chokes a novel that focuses more on introspection than action. While the vast majority of the novel is told from Emma’s third-person point of view, it occasionally character-hops in a manner that is jarring and inconsistent.
Though Emma’s life changes drastically, the reliance on clichés and all-too-familiar tropes makes it difficult to reach an emotional payoff.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-58328-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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