Scribner has done his homework on everything from radicalism to perfumes, but in service to an overly schematic plot.
An East Coast couple grows increasingly entangled in the political and emotional lives of Oregon radicals.
As the third novel by Scribner (The GoodLife, 2000; Miracle Girl, 2003) opens, Scanlon and Naomi are a married couple heading west under a cloud of anxiety. Scanlon is an academic who specializes in anarchist and secessionist movements, but a much-derided journal article has shut him out of teaching jobs at first-tier universities. Naomi, for her part, is worried about her pregnancy and unhappy to be living in a fogbound Oregon college town. But there are upsides: The clean air appears to have revived the acute sense of smell she lost in a car accident, which ended her career as a perfume designer, and Scanlon has plenty of source material for his research. Indeed, as Scanlon becomes increasingly involved in one such movement he’s eventually appointed its leader—which on top of being bad form academically puts him in the awkward company of Sequoia, a tempting Earth goddess type. Naomi, meanwhile, struggles to manage the new baby while growing closer to Clay, a young, brooding and sometimes violent anarchist. Scribner realistically captures the nature of secessionist movements, but he leaves room for humor, usually at Scanlon’s expense: He’s routinely put into humiliating situations with his skeptical department chair or academic colleagues, and sweats over his attraction to Sequoia. And writing about Naomi gives Scribner’s prose an interesting degree of sensual detail; she captures a surprising amount of information through smell. Still, the book feels overwritten, full of dry subplots and scenes packed with needless detail. Eventually, the plot strains credulity: Scanlon’s academic colleagues hardly bat an eye that he’s lost his objectivity in leading the anarchist collective, and the collective is largely oblivious that they’re thesis fodder. The author resolves the many plot threads, but requires a contrived ending to get there.
Scribner has done his homework on everything from radicalism to perfumes, but in service to an overly schematic plot.Pub Date: June 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59478-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
