While fracking is a foregone conclusion in this beautifully crafted novel, the riveting drama lies in the buried emotions...
Novelist, memoirist and short story writer Herrin (Romancing Spain, 2006, etc.) has managed to transform the high profile, politically divisive issue of fracking into a thoroughly human, moving family drama.
Sixty-year-old Frank Joyner has been living on his upstate New York farm with his grandson Danny while Danny’s mother (and Frank’s favorite child), Jen, sorts out her confused love life. But now the retired architect—a believer in continuity and sustenance whose crowning achievement has been the renovation of his boyhood school into a mixed-use apartment/retail complex—faces a dilemma. The farm, which he inherited from his mother, sits atop the Marcellus Shale, and his neighbors have all signed lucrative financial leases allowing Conklin Natural Gas to drill for natural gas on their lands using hydraulic fracturing. As reported by a journalist who has made Frank less than popular around town, Frank’s natural inclination is to leave the land alone. But as Frank’s son Mickey explains, even if Frank turns down the deal, the vertical drilling done on neighboring land will turn horizontal and run under his farm anyway. And his mother’s will stipulated that Frank share any benefits from the property with his two sisters, who could use the fracking lease money. On the other hand, Mickey, a high school history teacher going through his own messy psychological/spiritual crisis, points out the potential lasting value of the seemingly hopeless symbolic act. In fact, all of Frank’s loved ones and extended family are going through their own messy crises except maybe his oldest son, Gerald, who has escaped to California. Then, Frank’s pushy ex–brother-in-law engineers a meeting between Frank and a representative from Conklin’s competition. Not only do idealist Texan Kenny Brewster and Frank feel an immediate affinity, but Jen finds herself falling for Kenny as well. Herrin avoids moral self-righteousness about the political issue or the motivations that drive his characters.
While fracking is a foregone conclusion in this beautifully crafted novel, the riveting drama lies in the buried emotions that are unearthed for better and worse.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03276-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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