A bleak and disturbing story but one that offers a glimmer of hope.
In Hill’s debut, members of a troubled family converge to celebrate a milestone, with unexpected results.
Rheumatologist Abe Green loves sailing, but his wife, Cassandra, a sculptor, does not. When the couple and their daughter Elizabeth, newly accepted to Harvard, go sailing one day in San Francisco Bay, Abe reveals during an argument that he knows about Cassandra’s affair with a gallery owner, then leaps from the boat and swims away. Eight years later and divorced, Cassandra and her siblings, Howie and Mary, gather at their parents’ home in Maryland to celebrate their father’s 80th birthday; Elizabeth, in her final year of medical school, joins them and brings her boyfriend, Kyle, to meet her grandparents. Howard and Eunice Fabricant live above the family-owned funeral home and have raised their three children over the rooms where corpses await final preparations. On the eve of the big party, tragedy strikes, and instead of birthday festivities, the family prepares for a funeral for one of their own. As Cassandra deals with her grief, she recalls moments that have defined her life: both her fascination with dead bodies and her feelings of repulsion; her rejection of her mother’s desire that she one day assume the reins of the family business; the initial heady feelings of love for her former husband and their increasing alienation—emotions both Abe and Cassandra explore through a haze of marijuana when he shows up for the funeral. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s pain causes her to push Kyle away and question their relationship. Although the author’s early prose is a bit florid, as the story progresses the writing becomes more subdued and more suited to the multifaceted study. Hill has produced an unusual retrospective of a family torn apart by divorce and infidelity and so keenly affected by the immediate events in their lives that they are only barely aware of what’s transpiring around them, namely Hurricane Katrina’s ravaging of the Gulf Coast.
A bleak and disturbing story but one that offers a glimmer of hope.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1032-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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