A compelling story of Paris, art, and love throughout history.
A woman’s quest to discover the origin of a haunting heirloom leads her to a foreign country and family secrets in this novel from Blackwell (The Paris Key, 2015).
When Claire Broussard’s beloved grandmother, whom she calls Mammaw, gets sick, she abandons her career and boyfriend in Chicago and heads home to Louisiana. Back in Louisiana, Claire was known as Chance, but since then she’s taken every opportunity to distance herself from her old name, her long-gone mother, and her alcoholic father. Her roots have a stronger hold on her than she thought, though. When Claire finds a broken-but-beautiful mask that she remembers from her childhood, Mammaw tells her that it’s from Paris and instructs Claire to travel there to find out its story. After Mammaw’s death, Claire leaves for Paris with little more than her curiosity. When Claire finds the shop that made the mask, known as L’Inconnue de la Seine (The Unknown Woman of the Seine), she thinks she’s simply hit a dead end. But as Claire falls into a job at the shop, she begins to find out more about the history of the mask. She’s also drawn into the mysterious past of the grumpy-yet-intriguing mold-maker, Armand. Claire’s story is intertwined with the tale of Sabine, a young model in Paris in the 1890s. As Claire’s and Sabine’s stories progress, the reader learns how their lives are connected in deep and unexpected ways. Blackwell paints a picture of Paris that is both artistically romantic and realistically harsh. Although the story is slow-paced at times, the alternating points of view keep the reader’s interest.
A compelling story of Paris, art, and love throughout history.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-47370-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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