Not the best installment of the impressive trilogy, but an intriguing conclusion nonetheless.
The hardscrabble Allan family has faced nearly every threat their rough, self-sufficient pioneer life in Big Sur country has to offer, but it’s mankind that finally presents a challenge the family may not be able to overcome.
As in all the novels of Ross’ trilogy, Big Sur country is an entity unto itself. The land shaped all three generations of the Allans; it’s what defines them. But now the government is blasting a road through the pristine wild country Zande Allan loves, and the stubborn family patriarch is determined to stop it. His grandson and namesake, Zan, sees the road differently—it’s progress and opportunity, and he wants to be a part of its creation. When Zan defies his headstrong grandfather, Zande cuts him out of the family, and Zan begins working on the road crew, blasting away the land he’s always loved to allow more people to discover it. But after his irresponsible cousin, Tilli, kills the man who spurned her, Zan realizes he has to save the family’s reputation by taking the blame for the murder, which lands him in prison. Seven years later, he returns to a world that has moved on without him and makes no place for an ex-con—and the woman he loves is out of his reach because of it. Like all the Allans in Ross’ trilogy, Zan is a compelling character: strong-minded, honorable, hardworking. And like all the Allans, it’s his own unbending adherence to his core values that contributes to his undoing. In Zan’s case, it’s family pride that convinces him to save the honor of a cousin who doesn’t deserve his sacrifice; and later, stubborn pride—and fear—keep him from admitting his love for Lara Ramirez, the girl raised by his beloved grandmother. Co-written by Koeppel 50 years after Ross’ death, this installment doesn’t feel quite as smooth or authentic as the other two titles in the series. But like the others, it’s a fascinating character study, a realistic portrait of one of America’s final frontiers and a book that’s hard to put down.
Not the best installment of the impressive trilogy, but an intriguing conclusion nonetheless.Pub Date: April 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-467950-08-4
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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