Will Katie get her man? Will she make a break from this hard-luck population? The author’s masterful writing makes this...
A vivid portrayal of the disappointed young adults in Elephant Beach, a fading East Coast seaside town, in 1972. Beware the seductive lure of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
The world-weary proprietor of a local hangout tells Katie, the 18-year-old narrator of this affecting debut short story collection, “You’re different than the other kids around here. You want my advice? Get out of Dodge. Now.” But in the summer after her high school graduation, there is some life lesson that Katie needs to learn from this on-the-skids town and her colorful, chain-smoking friends. Everyone around her is trying to escape the challenging circumstances that surround them in this working-class community. The women’s dreams are quickly crushed in evanescent sexual affairs, which end in abandonment, arguments, abortions or just male indifference; the men they get involved with are too troubled or immature or stoned to be dependable partners. The rest of the country, roiling from the Vietnam War, seems distant, as does nearby Manhattan. Katie’s friends are both contemptuous and jealous of the occasional hippie or privileged student who drifts by. Mitch, who lost a leg in Vietnam and is drinking himself to death, is the poster boy for those unable to withstand the vicissitudes of life. Katie, who comes from a more affluent family but works at an A&P, is obsessed with Luke, an elusive, recently returned vet; she is also grappling with her own adoption. What makes the desperation that abounds compelling is Chicurel’s perfect pitch for the characters’ patter, which is blunt, cynical, often profane and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.
Will Katie get her man? Will she make a break from this hard-luck population? The author’s masterful writing makes this short stay in Elephant Beach worthwhile.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2014
ISBN: 9780399167072
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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