Go is a maximalist (lofty emotions, extreme settings) punching above his weight.
Young love in old Europe; 80 years later, the search for a fortune.
Debut novelist Go splices two stories in his extravagant, superficial debut. First, Ashley Walsingham meets Imogen Soames-Andersson in 1916 London. You know Ashley's type: the laconic upper-class Englishman who works better on the screen than the page. Here, he’s heir to a shipping fortune and a mountaineer, loosely based on British folk hero George Mallory. Imogen has a Swedish father, a stuffy diplomat, and an English mother. She’s a bohemian who reads the French symbolists and smokes in public. Their attraction is immediate and intense. It’s crammed into a few short days, yet this is a love story for the ages. “You’re everything,” Ashley tells her. Well, not quite. There’s a war going on, damn it, and the newly minted officer must join the troops in Northern France, after the obligatory tense farewell at the train station. The brute realities of trench warfare crowd out their romance, which now seems ethereal. Ashley is badly wounded; a pregnant Imogen travels to France. He urges marriage; she insists he leave the army first. She’s an irrational 19-year-old, causing disaster. Her father decrees she have the baby secretly, in Sweden; it will be raised by her sister Eleanor as her own. There’s a further complication when Ashley, who survives the war, stipulates his fortune must go to Imogen and her descendants. This opens the door to a second storyline, on a parallel track. It’s a trifle. Tristan, a young Californian, is told by a London lawyer the fortune is his if he can prove Imogen was his great-grandmother. The guy is a windup toy; Go sends him on a document search, traveling from Sweden to Paris to Berlin to Iceland to beat a seven-week deadline. On the other track, Ashley is part of a 1924 Everest expedition, braving the howling Himalayan wastelands, still bolstered by his love for the lost Imogen.
Go is a maximalist (lofty emotions, extreme settings) punching above his weight.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0458-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
PROFILES
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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