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
A novel that sometimes struggles under its own weight but that’s well worth reading.
Marlantes (What it Is Like to Go To War, 2011, etc.) moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the old-growth forests of Washington in this saga of labor and love.
It’s the late summer of 1901, and Aino Koski is learning to read and write courtesy of a schoolteacher boarding with her family in the Finnish backwoods, his textbook of choice The Communist Manifesto. Soon she’s a socialist, and so she will remain, even as her neighbors and siblings follow other beliefs and courses. Escaping the Russian occupation of her country, Aino and others in her community move across the waters to Washington state, where, despite her hope that America will prove a socialist paradise, any utopianism is worn away by the realities of endless hard work in the forests and mills: “Aksel’s hands," Marlantes writes, “work-hardened since he was a boy, still blistered from the nine-pound splitting maul and eight-foot-long bucksaw.” Aino devotes herself to labor activism while members of the Finnish immigrant community work, build families and lives, grow old, and die. Aino hardly has time to take a breath, but she still finds room for agonies of secret-charged love that stretch out over the decades, until fate finally allows some measure of happiness: “He leaned over and smothered his face in her hair,” Marlantes writes poetically of Aino’s husband-to-be, who has followed a hard path of his own, “and the pain and the disappointment poured out as he said her name over and over." The story is long and has its longueurs, but Marlantes carefully builds an epic world in the forests of Scandinavia and the Northwest, taking pains to round out each character, especially the long-suffering Aino. Drawing on his family history, he weaves themes from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic—as he writes, the paterfamilias has named all his children after the mythological heroes and heroines in its pages—as well as real-world events in the annals of the early-20th-century labor movement.
A novel that sometimes struggles under its own weight but that’s well worth reading.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2538-5
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
A captivating and uplifting tale about the essence of self-reliance and the unsung benefits of modern families.
A middle-aged woman who was adopted as a baby searches for her birth family as she simultaneously struggles to care for her own chronically ill daughter.
Ten-year-old Kylie Anderson suffers from food allergies, joint pain, headaches, skin irritations, and other symptoms of a mysterious chronic illness. Her mother, Ally, is at her wits' end attempting to adequately respond to her daughter’s ailments. Ally and her husband, Matt, have also recently separated, torn apart by the emotional and financial strain of caring for a sick child. When a new doctor tells Ally that Kylie’s disease might be genetic, Ally accepts that Kylie’s condition necessitates a genealogy search even though she never wanted to know about her own past. With the minimal effort of completing an at-home DNA test, Ally quickly locates a biological family member who lives less than an hour away. Unfortunately, Ally’s adoptive mother, Sophie, can’t stand the idea of reconnecting with the family that gave Ally away. As Ally attempts to piece together a medical history for Kylie without destroying her special relationship with Sophie, she also struggles to understand her feelings for her now-estranged husband. The couple dances around each other, worried for their daughter and nostalgic for what they’ve lost with each other. Circumstances grow increasingly complicated, and Ally must determine how to best move forward as a daughter, a mother, and a wife. Through Ally’s complex journey toward self-determination, this engaging, plot-driven tale examines what it really means to be part of a family. With the book told entirely from Ally’s perspective, the self-deprecating, girlfriend-y tone will draw readers right into Ally’s inner circle as she wrestles with questions about parenting, friendship, love, and loss. Replete with details about conventional and alternative medicine as well as quaintly humorous small-town moments of school board elections and run-ins with neighbors, the novel is engrossing throughout. Moments of self-doubt and embarrassment abound, but they are tempered by messages of hope and palpable love that hit just the right note.
A captivating and uplifting tale about the essence of self-reliance and the unsung benefits of modern families.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0643-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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