Provocative and elegantly written, but overly didactic. For all the talk, Eula never does confront her other self, and the...
Prison or sanctuary? That’s just one of the thorny relationship questions facing a pair of identical twins.
When Eula Kieland, director of the progressive Drayton Orphanage in Pennsylvania, accepts Becca and Linny Carey in 1926, she knows she’s bending the rules. (Both Eula and Drayton have real-life prototypes.) The charter stipulates white girls, and the twins have a black grandmother; but Eula is captivated by them, despite their secret world (they have their own vocabulary) and constant identity-fooling. Their tricks decrease as they settle in, and different racial identities emerge in a fight over an admirer, as Becca turns ultra-black, Linny ultra-white (their grandmother, who shows up later, has an unfortunate “polka-dot” pigmentation). Is all this a full plate? Not for Gardiner (Somewhere in France, 1999, etc.), keen to explore the double in all of us, but especially in Eula, who lies on the couch for two other real-life figures, the breakaway Freudian Otto Rank and the diarist Anaïs Nin. A third preoccupation is a history of the orphanage itself. These competing interests slow the narrative, for all the thrillingly melodramatic adventures of the twins, together though apart, after graduation. Becca wins a scholarship to Peiping, while Linny hops a freight to San Francisco. Different countries, same experiences: locked rooms and sexual exploitation. Linny escapes from a commune/whorehouse to return to Drayton, but Becca is caught up in political intrigue and unwittingly betrays a host of Chinese students; she will be raped by a ferryboat captain before her eventual rescue. Relative calm reigns after the twins’ reunion at Drayton, where Linny is now a sewing mistress, despite an episode between them of life-threatening violence (possibly an inherent inevitably with identical twins, warned Rank). By the end, Linny is a successful designer, living with Becca in the Philadelphia ghetto.
Provocative and elegantly written, but overly didactic. For all the talk, Eula never does confront her other self, and the twins never clear the hurdle of dating and marriage.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-231-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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