An engrossing, character-driven family saga.
The 2000 summer season in fictional Long Harbor, Rhode Island, becomes the setting for a family reunion and the revelation of a long-held secret, not to mention the airing of more than a few resentments, in this debut novel.
Becca Meister Fitzpatrick presides over the family’s rambling summer “cottage,” Eden, which she owns jointly with her two older surviving brothers, Thomas and Edward. But Becca, now in her 70s, is in financial trouble. Her husband, Dan, died suddenly the previous fall, and it turns out he was a very careless guardian of the couple’s wealth. He was more interested in golf, the sea, and partaking in the social scene than in his medical practice. Becca is broke. She is hoping that Thomas and Edward will buy her share of the house and keep Eden, built by their father in the early 1920s. This sprawling 20th-century family tale, complete with rivalries, tragedies, and a continuing thread of unexpected pregnancies, smoothly alternates between past and present, going back to 1915, when Becca’s parents, Bunny and Sadie, first met. Now Sarah, Becca’s unmarried granddaughter, announces that she is pregnant; the Meister/Fitzpatrick clan is about to welcome its fifth generation. Eden has been a family anchor for almost 80 years, most especially for Becca. Long Harbor is a lower octane Newport, but the social pretensions can hold their own against any of today’s wealthy beach enclaves. Blasberg’s evocative prose captures the place and atmosphere: “The glass was streaked with salt and sand, and there were cobwebs between the screen and the storms. Outside a gentle rain was falling, a purifying springtime shower.” Becca is a rich, complex character: on one level, damaged by her mother’s need to avoid scandal, and on another, the eager standard bearer of the family’s legacy. Readers are privy to tantalizing information that the current clan members will never learn (for example, Bunny placed Sadie in a sanitarium for a year when she suffered from depression after Becca’s birth), and so even the central protagonist is not able to appreciate fully the trajectory of cascading actions and consequences.
An engrossing, character-driven family saga.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-234-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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