A bracing, knotty exploration of abuse and its impact across decades.
A man returns to his hometown to dismantle a barn, a symbol for his confrontation with the broken home he was raised in.
Cole, the hero of Scribner’s fourth novel (The Oregon Experiment, 2011, etc.), fled as far from his upbringing as possible, leaving his native Connecticut for Portland, Oregon. But he’s back in East Granby because his high-end construction business demands quality chestnut wood like the kind used to build a tobacco drying shed back in his hometown. He’s sidestepping family problems in Oregon: an estranged wife, Nikki, and a teenage son, Daniel, who’s courting school expulsion for his defiant freegan attitude. But he’s got family problems back east, too, where his father, Phil, has returned home after a prison stint for murdering Cole’s mother. Ignoring dad is tempting but difficult since he’s displaying symptoms of Alzheimer’s. That’s a lot of domestic drama to carry (not to mention Cole’s run-ins with a former bully), but Scribner mostly handles it with grace and a fine eye for detail around his Connecticut setting; he writes beautifully about the hills and tobacco fields that define the area. The novel's real turf, though, is the bleak emotional territory of abuse, and Scribner writes with brutal intensity about the violence Cole’s father rained down on his family and how that anger has been passed down through Cole and Daniel. Scribner’s prose can be overgrown, and some plotlines feel untenable; the righteously political Daniel registers only a mild protest at working in the tobacco industry when he comes for a change of scenery. But Scribner wisely avoids clichéd father-son teaching moments, instead drilling deeper into ever darker material, arguing that the stories abused children tell themselves about violence are often cover for even worse degradations. The novel ends on a redemptive note, but not before running its leads through an emotional gauntlet.
A bracing, knotty exploration of abuse and its impact across decades.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-52179-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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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