Heartwarming and funny with nary a slip into sentimentality.
The octogenarian heroine of Larson’s pointedly comic second novel (Slipstream, 2006) refuses to adjust meekly to life in an assisted-living facility.
At 82, Cora Sledge is grossly overweight, unable to walk more that a few steps and secretly addicted to pills. Deciding she can no longer take care of herself in the San Diego home where she lived for decades with her husband Abel (recently deceased), her three middle-aged children move her into assisted living. The kids are probably right, but Cora is fighting mad when she begins a journal to record her suffering at The Palisades. Though an obvious plot device, the journal works because Cora’s cantankerous voice is so strong and authentic as she describes her present life and remembers her past. Born in Missouri of tough working-class stock, she married Abel, who knew she was pregnant by another man. Although she grew to love her warm, decent husband, she learned to steel herself against the kind of heartbreak she went through with her lover. Cora has become a woman who keeps her distance even from her children. Nor does she suffer fools, among whom she includes the doddering residents of The Palisades, described with withering hilarity. The one friend she makes is gay health technician Marcos, who brings her forbidden snacks and cigarettes. Cigarettes also bring her into contact with fellow resident Vitus Kovis, an Eastern European charmer. Soon Cora is losing weight and weaning herself from the pills, driven by her girlish passion for Vitus, who admits to a checkered past. When The Palisades is struck by a string of thefts, Cora’s prize crystal, a gift from her father, goes missing, and her ungrounded suspicion of Marcos almost destroys their friendship. Meanwhile Cora’s daughter meets Vitus, now Cora’s fiancé, and has her own suspicions, as do readers. Fortunately, suspense is less the point here than Cora’s hard-won self-reclamation.
Heartwarming and funny with nary a slip into sentimentality.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46076-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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