Creates more sympathy for its male characters than its female ones.
Four New York women juggle family and career, generally preferring the latter to the former.
“Did you see that article in the paper the other day? A scientist in Australia found a way to fertilize eggs without sperm.…It’s the end of men,” reports Maggie, one of four gal pals at the center of Rinaldi’s uninspired debut. Maggie, Beth, and Anna work for a company called Red Hot Mama, a manufacturer of controversial sexy lingerie for pregnant and nursing women, the ongoing target of angry demonstrations and threatening mail. Anna’s sister, Isabel, is an associate publisher at a magazine called Pink. Barely pregnant, she learns that her boss thinks “we should hire women who are either too old to get pregnant or too ugly to get knocked up—haha!” When she calls Anna to report this, Anna tells her not to worry. “The feeling that the world will no longer value you because you are going to be a mother will disappear once you realize that you’ll get better at your job because the bullshit will become meaningless and will roll off your back.” If you have a low tolerance for clunky, didactic dialogue, this is not the book for you; dated-feeling feminist ideas take precedence over both character development and plot. Isabel’s husband is out of town a lot so she cheats on him with an ex throughout her entire pregnancy. Anna is really angry because her husband doesn’t help enough with the kids and she’s pregnant again. Beth is raising a kid on her own as the HIV-positive father approaches his demise. Then there’s Maggie, who, like the protagonist of the movie Maggie’s Plan, has gotten sick of the man she stole from his first wife and is now plotting to give him back. According to the author’s note, she had given up on this novel when she narrated part of its plotline to director Rebecca Miller, who made it into a movie. This is now considered a selling point of the book, printed on the cover and discussed in a foreword, though it’s not clear why.
Creates more sympathy for its male characters than its female ones.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-256899-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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