by Katherine Govier ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2003
Carefully crafted and deeply thoughtful, but not for the casual traveler.
Seeking elusive birds for his great work, John James Audubon sails to the northern reaches of the continent—and begins understanding the possibility of species extinction.
In an ambitious and dense effort, Canadian novelist Govier (Going Through the Motions, 1982, etc.) fills in a largely undocumented gap in Audubon’s search to document all the birds of North America. Nearing 50, semifamous, financing his research with balky subscriptions for the work in progress, the hugely talented but insecure artist has financed an expedition to Canada’s maritimes to find and document the Great Auk and other rare birds. He leaves behind, as always, a domestic mess. His beloved wife Lucy, robbed of income by the needs of her husband’s magnum opus, keeps up the homefront, barely clinging to respectability. While Lucy holds off the bailiffs, her husband has been in Charleston, South Carolina, flirting seriously with Maria Martin, an attractive spinster whose superb renderings of American fauna will be mingled with Audubon’s avian portraits. Maria is constantly in his thoughts as Audubon sails up the Canadian coast, poking into coves, sinking into bogs, killing the hundreds of birds that will sit for their portraits. He is accompanied by his son Johnny, also a talented painter, and a couple of jovial young naturalists. Also working the waters is Royal Navy Captain Henry Bayfield, who is charting the hideously complex and dangerous coastline, balancing his own demands for perfection against the Admiralty’s wish not to spend too much money. The sailor and artist form an odd and prickly friendship, and their awkward tradings of observations and philosophy provide the most compelling moments in this necessarily chilly narrative. Bayfield hears rather more than he may want to about Audubon’s inner life, but, together, the two men reckon with the dawning idea that the epic slaughter of seemingly inexhaustible wildlife by human intruders will have dire and permanent consequences.
Carefully crafted and deeply thoughtful, but not for the casual traveler.Pub Date: May 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-58567-410-9
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
BOOK REVIEW
by Roy Jacobsen translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
BOOK REVIEW
by Roy Jacobsen & translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
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