An often enjoyable but slight shaggy dog tale that focuses on the journey, not the destination.
Polman’s (Seven Layer Cake, 2019, etc.) offbeat novel offers two alternating stories that run along parallel tracks and involve the same narrator.
In a plotline set in 2016, 56-year-old James is trying to find his dog, Kodiak, after it runs off with a pack of strays. He follows the animals on foot and finds himself far from his neighborhood with a dead cellphone, unable to call home. He winds up stopping to visit his elderly father and his adult daughter, Emma; he also encounters a host of strangers, all while tracking signs of where the pack may have gone. In the other story track, set in 1985, 25-year-old James takes a solo bike ride from Louisiana to Tennessee and back. He meets a lot of new people on the road during this journey, as well, and tests his ability to survive on his own. In both tales, James has flashbacks that build a picture of his entire life, including his relationship with his divorced parents and with Emma, who’s still struggling to overcome the trauma of a break-in in the later story. Overall, this is a fast read, and James is an engaging, likable character. The two-tiered structure helps keeps the plot moving forward, and it never dawdles too long in one place. Polman’s prose is mostly straightforward and clear, outside of his predilection for occasionally distracting punctuation and formatting; at one point, for instance, he writes, “Never a dull moment. (Mostly.) – Now THERE’S an idea for a gravestone inscription!” As quickly as these stories pass, however, they never get terribly deep. James contemplates his father’s mild drinking problem and Emma’s troubles but never comes to any compelling conclusions about either. Most strangers enter and leave his life quickly and don’t seem to have much impact on him. Also, a few sequences make little sense; during “the most terrifying experiences of the tour,” for example, younger James sees a church sign that he thinks is creepy, finds a deserted camp site, and hides from a police car for no discernible reason.
An often enjoyable but slight shaggy dog tale that focuses on the journey, not the destination.Pub Date: May 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5466-6729-2
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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