Richly characterized, beautifully written, and heartbreakingly poignant—another winner from this talented and popular author.
A Wisconsin girl reluctantly comes of age in Hamilton’s tender and rueful latest (Laura Rider's Masterpiece, 2009, etc.).
A suspenseful opening chapter, with the Lombards racing to get their freshly baled hay into the barn before the clouds overhead let loose the rain that would ruin it, deftly sets the scene for the fraught family drama that follows. Narrator Mary Frances—alternately known as Francie, Frankie, Marlene, or MF depending on who’s addressing her and what stage of her tumultuous development she's at—has total confidence in her father’s ability to grapple antiquated farm equipment and “outwit a storm.” Her adored older brother, William, has less faith and more awareness of the harsh realities facing their Wisconsin apple orchard at the turn of the 21st century. Their father Jim’s health has been battered by years of manual labor; his cousin and co-owner, Sherwood, is dreamy and impractical. Sherwood’s wife, Dolly, incessantly reminds their children of the better life that awaits them with a college degree. Jim’s wife, Nellie, a sharp-tongued librarian who's seen her modest inheritance swallowed up by the orchard, does her best to point William and Francie in the same direction, only to outrage the daughter who desperately insists that she's going to stay put and make sure the orchard goes on just as it has for four generations. The story unfolds as a series of snapshots, discontinuous and tumbled together in an order that follows the emotional logic of memories. A geography bee that Francie deliberately loses, a snooping expedition that results in her getting locked in the room of an eccentric older relative, and the wrenching loss of a beloved hired hand who is more like a second mother are among the incidents that chronicle Francie’s bumpy progress toward maturity, which she resists almost as fiercely as the knowledge that the way of life embodied in her beloved orchard is slowly vanishing.
Richly characterized, beautifully written, and heartbreakingly poignant—another winner from this talented and popular author.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-6422-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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