While Callanan writes about the difficulties of family relationships and the creative process with a knowing hand, the...
A pointedly literary romance—fueled by two children’s classics—about a Wisconsin woman who moves to Paris with her two daughters after her husband’s disappearance.
From the beginning of their relationship, Robert and Leah shared their separate dreams of Paris. Robert, an author of young adult fiction, has always identified with the Madeline books by Ludwig Bemelmans; former film student Leah, who’s become the family breadwinner as an academic speechwriter, is drawn to the Albert Lamorisse film The Red Balloon. When Robert, struggling with his writing and mental health, disappears without a trace, Leah and her daughters, Ellie and Daphne, then 14 and 12, don't want to believe he's dead but also don’t want to believe he purposely left them. Then Leah finds that Robert has bought them tickets to Paris. Soon she's running a quaint bookstore in the Marais, sending the girls to an excellent French public school, eating wonderful French food, and having various romantic adventures. She is also remembering and analyzing her life with Robert, who remains an unsatisfying enigma to the reader as well as to narrator Leah. Nevertheless, Callanan (Listen, 2015) uses every magnet in his arsenal to draw readers of a certain sensitive literary persuasion: the Parisian bookstore, of course; romance between a 40-something woman and an erudite younger man (who is African-American, for good measure); a helpful, impeccably dressed gay male friend; precocious teenagers who love to read; obvious plot parallels to the children’s classics; and the mystery surrounding a manuscript from the still-missing Robert that follows the storyline of his family in Paris too closely for Leah’s comfort. Is Robert in Paris too? Is he hiding from his family or searching for them? Does Leah want him back, or is she relieved to escape the burden of his unhappiness?
While Callanan writes about the difficulties of family relationships and the creative process with a knowing hand, the magical Paris he creates feels forced and threadbare.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98627-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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