Simplistic and underplotted; the most interesting characters (Mary’s mother, the eccentric grandparents) are confined to the...
Women rescue a crushed young wife from a domestic tyrant, in Gibbons’s seventh novel (after On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, 1998).
It’s September 1918, and 22-year-old Mary Oliver is leaving home (Washington, DC) to spend time with her pregnant aunt Maureen in North Carolina. But first some background. In 1875, Nora Ross left husband Toby (Mary’s maternal grandfather) after he became a nudist, going south with their son Troop. The impossible Nora proceeded to wring money out of the wealthy Toby, while vilifying him incessantly and raising Troop to believe in his own entitlement. Troop has become independently rich and a monstrous egotist. By 1918 he has been married for five years to the beautiful but malleable Maureen, from a poor family in Mississippi. The reader must also sort through Mary’s family: her grandparents (two sets), mother Martha (Troop’s half-sister), brother (a suicide), and father (death a mystery). So it’s a relief to reach the less cluttered landscape of Elm City, North Carolina. The smart, self-assured Mary finds that Troop, without harming his wife physically, has reduced her to abject fear and dependency, even hiding her mother’s letters. His subjugation of Maureen has become “a mechanical process.” That’s exactly right: Troop is a dull monster. Time for Mary to go to work. She has Maureen read letters written by her mother’s close friend Judith, who had walked out on her philandering husband and reclaimed her own body and identity through free love. These letters are an awkward device, but their feminist message works like a charm on Maureen; further emboldened by strong support from her mother in yet another letter (cleverly retrieved by Mary), she now stands up to Troop. Despite a stillborn daughter and the influenza epidemic stalking the nation, the future looks bright for Maureen as she heads for Washington with Mary, leaving Troop, for whom appearances are everything, uncharacteristically ranting in the street.
Simplistic and underplotted; the most interesting characters (Mary’s mother, the eccentric grandparents) are confined to the margins.Pub Date: April 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15160-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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