A sprawling and somewhat unfocused tale of life, love, and family.
A blue-blood American family endures trials and tribulations from the 1950s through the present day.
The WASPy Chadwicks are “like American royalty,” a vast extended clan with money and roots dating back to before the Revolution. When Allen’s (The Hanging Man, 2018, etc.) ambitious and expansive novel opens, it’s 1954, and the family has gathered for its annual Thanksgiving celebration at the Old Home. Aging patriarch Pop suddenly dies, which sets the stage for a new generation of Chadwicks to come to the fore, including stockbroker Ted; his loving wife, Jane; and a confusing passel of kids, grandchildren, cousins, and in-laws. This multigenerational family saga offers a snapshot of American life through the decades as the Chadwicks deal with unplanned pregnancies, an interracial romance, economic crises, and more. Mores may shift and political winds change, but the Chadwicks prove resilient, as their strong commitment to family keeps them together. Unfortunately, that might not be enough to hold readers’ interest. There’s the germ of a compelling story here, but the book lacks tension and is overstuffed with characters and competing plot points. Potentially dramatic twists—a suspected suicide, the specter of AIDS—are swiftly introduced and even more quickly resolved. Several chapters open with a rote recitation of significant world events at the time. While this device attempts to situate the story in a larger historical context, these incidents are largely divorced from the everyday lives of the various Chadwicks. Intriguing characters abound, like a sexually repressed Army colonel and an ambitious young woman who marries the son of a Mexican cabinet secretary, although they beg to be explored in more depth. But Allen has wisely chosen his setting, with most scenes occurring at the quaint family compound near Plattsburgh, New York, to which the family returns again and again over the years. Without this home base, “a huge weathered clapboard house” on the shore of Lake Champlain, the Chadwicks would likely have splintered long ago. But by maintaining a physical link to a shared past, they are also able to stay connected to one another, “happy to be who they were, and where they were.”
A sprawling and somewhat unfocused tale of life, love, and family.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Rogue Phoenix Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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