Lester’s tendency toward preachy platitudes—“without loving myself, I cannot hope to love another”—undercuts the power of...
An issue-centered novel from former British journalist Lester showcases severe autism from the point of view of a devoted, deeply flawed father.
Ten-year-old Jonah cannot speak, is not toilet-trained, and has emotionally exhausted his parents: lawyer Emma, the primary breadwinner, and Ben, who supposedly manages his father’s Georg’s catering equipment business, although he spends much of his workday at the pub. In desperation, Emma and Ben apply to place Jonah in a residential school offering the care he needs. When the local school district, required to cover the extremely high tuition, cites Jonah’s “loving family” as a reason to reject his enrollment at the school (although American readers may be amazed at how much help the British government does offer), Emma suggests that she and Ben pretend to separate before appealing the ruling. Ben reluctantly agrees. He and Jonah move in with Georg, while Emma remains behind in their home. Though she has carefully organized a plan for Ben to follow in order to get Jonah transferred to the residential school, she becomes increasingly unavailable to talk to Ben or see Jonah and even advises Ben to borrow the money for legal costs from his father since she has tied up their funds in an investment. Ben and Georg, a gruff refugee from Hungary, have a difficult relationship. Ben’s mother left when he was 12, and Ben resents that his emotionally withholding father openly adores Jonah and tells him stories about his Jewish childhood in Hungary that he’s never shared with Ben himself. Then Georg is diagnosed with cancer. As Ben cares for both Jonah and Georg while carrying out Emma’s school-appeal blueprint, he must finally face the two long-avoided issues that have concerned his friends and Lester’s readers all along: Ben’s dependence on booze and his misreading of so much about his relationships with Emma and Georg.
Lester’s tendency toward preachy platitudes—“without loving myself, I cannot hope to love another”—undercuts the power of his heart-wrenching characters and plot.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1472-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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