A sorrowful, fully felt collection that will drag you under.
A sprawling cast of women is submerged in suffering in Grow’s luminous and grim debut collection.
Like the watery bodies it evokes, the prose in these stories is translucent and sparkling. Water imagery—as a source of buoyancy, protection, fear, and comfort—abounds. “I come up for a quick breath and dive back under because he’s starting to say the thing again,” says the protagonist of “Stray.” “I love the thick silence water makes so sounds can’t touch me. It’s an escape I learned as a child.” Each story is an exploration of motherhood, wifehood, daughterhood, or neighborhood: the relationships that make up and strangle the characters, who are all, in their own ways, drowning. A housewife tries to come to grips with the inconsequentiality of her life in the title story. In “Small Deaths,” a daughter must inch her mother’s body across a bedroom floor after her protracted illness and death. In “Still at War,” a veteran’s wife oversees his interview by a local churchgoer and hovers at the edge of revealing their shared secret—that he’s been utterly undone by his service. A woman tries to walk away from her unfaithful husband but is repeatedly foiled by odd situations in “OK, Goodbye.” One story in particular rises above the others: “What Girls Leave Behind,” in which an alcoholic mother loses her young girls. This story climbs above the fog of sorrow that envelops the rest of the collection. Its raw immediacy is equal parts story and slice of pain and will leave you gasping. This is, perhaps, the only difficulty of this collection: the darkness at times feels overwhelming, and there is little relief until the book is over.
A sorrowful, fully felt collection that will drag you under.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-938103-03-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
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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