Lots of symbolic portent—the past, the sea, the family—and an overcomplicated narrative structure attempt to turn an...
Financial threats to a family estate in the Irish countryside abruptly leave a man and woman empty nesters without their nest.
Pretty much the entire plot of this debut novel reveals itself in the opening chapter. A mother and daughter have locked themselves into an unused ballroom in the family manor after the mother, who “had grown strange,” had yanked the daughter out of the boarding school she had just begun attending. The father tries to get them to open the door, but they ignore him. The daughter’s younger brother has died. The rest of the novel fills in the details—names, motivations, how the past has led to the present—in a manner that plays hopscotch with chronology and point of view. More than half the novel after that scene-setting intro finds chapters alternating between the perspectives (but not the voices) of father John and son Philip as the family prepares to turn its house over to the government as a tourist attraction and move to a small cottage on the grounds. John has apparently been keeping the family’s perilous financial condition (as well as a more lucrative option) a secret from his wife. Eight-year-old Philip wonders where he will play, and he hates the thought of other children touring what was his bedroom (where he will no longer be allowed). John’s chapters provide some context on the family history and that of the estate, how history seems to both repeat itself and break from the past. Then comes another long section narrated in the first person by mother Marianne, who remembers her courtship with John and her introduction to the countryside. Then a quick concluding chapter returns the novel full circle without really providing resolution. As John muses, “there had to be unsaid things between husbands and wives, and he had learnt that, though these were the things that saved you, they separated you too.”
Lots of symbolic portent—the past, the sea, the family—and an overcomplicated narrative structure attempt to turn an elemental melodrama into a novel with more literary weight.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-22883-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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