The ending hits a perfect emotional note: bittersweet and honest, comforting and regretful.
Family members force a teenager to give up her daughter for adoption in 1950s Quebec.
At a time when Quebec is not only divided, but violently polarized by the tension between French and English cultures, Maggie cannot understand what keeps her polished English father, owner of a prosperous seed store, married to her working-class, rough-spun French mother. When she falls passionately in love with Gabriel, a poor French farm boy, at 15 and ends up pregnant, her parents forbid her to keep the baby. Maggie goes on to marry a wealthy man, but she never forgets her daughter, Elodie, and finally begins to make inquiries to find her. The narrative becomes split between Elodie’s life and Maggie’s life. Raised by nuns at a local orphanage, Elodie is an energetic child, but when the little girl is 7, the Canadian government carries out a ruthless plan to rebrand all Catholic orphanages as homes for the mentally ill. Practically overnight, thousands of orphans are designated mentally unfit, lost in a system of abuse and neglect. Maggie’s attempts to locate her daughter are stonewalled and met with lies; it’s not until more than 20 years later that she learns the truth with Gabriel’s help. This is a strongly political novel about the little-known injustices that mark a particular time and place, but it’s also a very personal story. Goodman’s (The Finishing School, 2017, etc.) biographical blurb acknowledges that it’s based on the story of her own mother. Perhaps because of this, the characters who could have easily come across as types or clichés take on a great emotional depth. The novel centers around the definition, the challenges, the triumph of family, but it also acknowledges that Elodie and Maggie’s story is one of many.
The ending hits a perfect emotional note: bittersweet and honest, comforting and regretful.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-268424-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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