Engagingly cleareyed prose about a winningly eccentric heroine in love with trees and literature.
In Kane’s (This Close, 2013, etc.) contemplative second novel, a woman uses an unexpected gift of time to visit four long-neglected friends.
Despite the wire hanger of a plot surrounding these visits, the novel turns on narrator May’s ruminations. Her love of cats and trees (beautiful arboreal drawings by Edward Carey punctuate the text), not to mention her suitcase named Grendel, suggests a delicate, even twee sensibility, but May is capable of expressing curmudgeonly tart opinions about everything from home renovation to the value of neighbors to social media’s evils. Approaching 40, she lives quietly with her aged father in her hometown, working as a gardener at the local university and pondering how best to use 30 days of paid leave the school has awarded her. Inspired by readings on friendship, a skill she’d like to improve, and using The Odyssey as a reverse model of epic adventuring—“What if Penelope had left?” she asks herself—May sets off to visit her long-distance friends. All are surprised by May’s visits but pleased to see her. In return, May follows Emily Post and Greek travel etiquette to become a perfect guest, although she tends to hover at the brink of actual intimacy. Her cautious affection blends with sly humor in her observations of each hostess: the suburban homemaker cracking under the pressure of creating internet-worthy domestic perfection; the Seattle ultraprogressive in the middle of a divorce; the Manhattan sophisticate stressed by her new roles as second wife and stepmother; and the landscape architect leading an invitingly cozy single life in London. May is generous in sharing her thoughts, but the reader must search between the lines to read her heart as May begins receiving postcards hinting at a desire for more than friendship from a nice man back home. More apparent is May’s emotional struggle with unresolved grief over her mother’s lingering illness and death years earlier.
Engagingly cleareyed prose about a winningly eccentric heroine in love with trees and literature.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55922-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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