A highly strung novel that’s strengthened by its attention to how people forgive and connect.
In Patrick’s debut novel, a teenager seeks out her father, who has bipolar disorder.
After her mother commits suicide, 15-year-old Regan Whitmer escapes her bad memories and her stepfather’s religious strictures to go in search of her biological father, Will Fletcher, whom she’s never met. He lives in Half Moon Hollow, Ohio (population 1,500), the kind of town that worships its high school football team and has little tolerance for people like Will, who has bipolar disorder. He used to be a veterinarian, but now he cleans up cages at the animal shelter. His younger sister, Janey, a comic-book artist, is his guardian, and if she can’t control him, the next step is institutionalization. Will, who once lost an infant daughter, doesn’t feel ready to be a parent when Regan appears, but Janey insists on welcoming her. As Regan adjusts to a new high school, Will’s reputation does her no favors, but popular football player Lane Barrett takes a liking to her, and the new school principal, Lindsay Shepherd, is kind. As various characters try to make meaningful connections—Will and Regan, Regan and Lane, Lindsay and Will, Janey and Lindsay—their efforts are often hampered by corrosive shame, loss, or regret. Dramatic events lead to revelations and reconciliations. In her debut novel, Patrick writes with sensitivity about the trials of mental illness for both sufferers and caregivers. She also captures Regan’s past and present struggles well, making her a thoughtful young person, not just a victim. The tragedy at the novel’s heart, the baby’s death, is also heartbreaking but not exploitative. However, the story is overloaded with melodrama, especially when the mayor becomes a hard-to-believe Snidely Whiplash–style villain. A final twist at the end is also ill-considered, badly undercutting the novel’s emotional logic regarding Will’s efforts to come to terms with a mistake. Still, Patrick’s hopefulness about recovery, friendship, and caring is well-earned.
A highly strung novel that’s strengthened by its attention to how people forgive and connect.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943006-18-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Spark Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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