An eloquent tale about real-life people with difficult problems.
A Massachusetts landlady befriends a tenant’s feisty daughter as they both unravel painful family secrets in this debut novel.
At the age of 72, Lena Barzetti has settled into a comfortable routine in 1999 as the longtime co-owner of a property company in Cambridge. She still goes into the office a few times a week, searches for vacant buildings to buy, and doesn’t get mixed up in other people’s business. A wild young girl arrives on the scene in the form of Kalayla Leeroyce, a biracial, green-eyed spitfire with an outrageously smart mouth. Lena discovers the girl lives with her mother, Maureen, in the same apartment building as she does, right across the hall. Knowing Maureen doesn’t have much money or free time, Lena tries to help Kalayla, including giving her a book with a black girl on the cover. Kalayla is hardly impressed and ruefully notes: “Tomorrow she’d probably be bringing me a book about a white girl ’cause my mama was white.” But she warms up to Lena and her home cooking and suggestions about activities. Kalayla’s father is dead and Maureen has told her that her own family, the O’Rourkes, died in a gas leak. As that story slowly falls apart, Kalayla has to confront painful realities about interracial marriages and their effects in the present day. Similarly, Lena has dealt with loss for decades, including two sons killed in Vietnam and one who disappeared after moving “out West.” Her abusive husband, Joey, is dead, but the bad memories persist, and she longs to find her missing son. Lena, Kalayla, and Maureen live in an old school, rough-and-tumble world, but there is also kindness, which they cling to as they confront the pasts they’ve tried to bury. Nicholas’ carefully layered novel excels at creating lifelike families with complicated, even sordid histories that touch on complex social problems. Marriages can be for business relationships; violence is a fact of life; and people can die young. The way that the author weaves in the memories with the present-day story is skillfully done and lends a good deal of authenticity to the characters. But the book can be slow going at times, and the middle section tends to drag. A more concise writing style would have strengthened the vivid journey toward the fully realized conclusion.
An eloquent tale about real-life people with difficult problems.Pub Date: June 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-49075-5
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Nurturing Light
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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