Shenny starts her narration by warning that first impressions “can be dead wrong,” but there’s never a question as to who’s...
In Kagen’s hardcover debut (Land of a Hundred Wonders, 2008), a young Virginia girl puzzles over her mother’s disappearance.
It is 1969, shortly before the moon landing and one year since Shenny’s mother Evie, an educated, liberal Yankee whom Shenny’s father married against his family’s wishes, disappeared. Shenny’s twin sister Woody—the girls are 11 when the story opens—has stopped speaking and their father Walter, a respected judge from the influential Carmody family, has become a raving drunk who locks the girls in the root cellar overnight when they disobey his orders to stay home in order to avoid communication with anyone outside the family. Tomboy Shenny and increasingly fragile Woody disobey frequently, visiting the friends Evie cultivated behind her husband’s back as their marriage soured. The girls are especially fond of Beezy, an elderly black woman who was once a Carmody servant, and her handsome, blue-eyed son Sam, who used to be a police detective in Illinois before he came home to run a gas station. Since no body or clues have been found, the local sheriff investigating Evie’s disappearance seems to have hit a dead end. Shenny starts her own investigation with no better luck. Her acuity is questionable. Although she claims to be surprised by her father’s transformation from loving to abusive father, she was aware of the troubles in her parents’ marriage which involved Walter’s attempts to bully Evie the same way his father and brother bully all the women in their lives. The Carmody men are cartoonishly evil—rich, misogynistic, predatory and racist—while Shenny’s Carmody grandmother is a Catholic religious fanatic. Although Kagen makes references to cultural touchstones like Vietnam and the moon landing, her version of 1969 Virginia veers from anachronistically innocent to anachronistically backward. And Shenny’s determined pluck seems both too innocently young and too precocious to coalesce into a believable 12-year-old.
Shenny starts her narration by warning that first impressions “can be dead wrong,” but there’s never a question as to who’s good or bad in her story.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-525-95154-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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