bookshelf

THE RIVER WIFE

Name: THE RIVER WIFE
Author: Jonis Agee
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6596-7

by Jonis Agee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2007

Despite fevered descriptions and various half-developed characters meandering down plot paths leading nowhere, the...

bookshelf

A catfish stew of a novel from Agee (The Weight of Dreams, 1999, etc.), covering three generations of a Missouri farming family that can’t shake its river pirate roots.

In 1930, Hedie Rails marries charming spendthrift Clement Ducharme and moves to his farm at Jacques’ Landing. Desperate for money to keep the farm afloat, Clement disappears frequently on probably criminal business. Left behind, pregnant and lonely, Hedie finds a journal—a too obviously artificial literary device—that tells the Ducharme family history. In 1811, river pirate Jacques Ducharme saves Annie Lark’s life after an earthquake leaves her crippled. They marry but their early passion withers when Jacques’ vicious dogs kill their child in a horrifying scene. Annie dies in a flood. Jacques’ main cohort and confidante becomes Omah, the daughter of freed slaves. After the Civil War, Jacques murders his second wife, Laura, who has proved herself both unfaithful and greedy. Omah helps him raise Laura’s daughter, Little Maddie, the novel’s one lovable character. When Jacques finally dies, his will requires that Little Maddie remain celibate if she wants to keep the farm. Instead, after a 13-year love affair, she uses a horse to bribe her way into getting both farm and marriage, then dies two years later. Her son is Clement. He squanders Hedie’s love with his unquenchable lust for money, and possibly other women. After Hedie miscarries their first child, she befriends the black couple down the road whose daughter, Omah’s granddaughter, India, becomes Clement’s apparent lover. Then Hedie, again pregnant, finds Clement shot in the front seat of his car with India dead in the back. She follows his dying orders to bury him in quicksand so she can keep Jacques’ Landing and raise the next Ducharme generation.

Despite fevered descriptions and various half-developed characters meandering down plot paths leading nowhere, the violence-spiked romance upon violence-spiked romance becomes addictive.

Pub Date: July 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-1-4000-6596-7

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONES OF PARADISE
by Jonis Agee

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WEIGHT OF DREAMS
by Jonis Agee

- BOOK REVIEW
A .38 SPECIAL AND A BROKEN HEART
by Jonis Agee

bookshelf

BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

bookshelf

Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

bookshelf

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.