Along with creating a fully realized, realistic heroine seen across decades, Hatton is a writer of often exceptional prose,...
Margot Fiske is seen at ages 15 and 73 as she variously pursues and recalls her relationship with marine biologist Ed Ricketts and relates how she came to run an aquarium.
The 15-year-old Margot and her entrepreneurial father have been bouncing around the world as this debut novel opens with their arrival in Monterey, California, in 1940. When she falls and gashes her head while working with Ed, he carries her to his lab, stitches her wound, and introduces her to sex, believing her claim to be 20. After the truth emerges and Ed grows distant, Margot carries a torch even as she comes to know the scientist’s libidinous, hard-drinking side and his cantankerous friend John Steinbeck. There was a marine biologist named Ed Ricketts who in the 1930s worked in the Monterey Bay area where Steinbeck set Cannery Row and who is the basis for characters in several of the Nobelist’s novels. This borrowing from history is less interesting than the twisting path that eventually brings the resourceful Margot back to Monterey Bay in the 1980s with a sizable fortune and a plan to honor her father’s Monterey venture and Ed’s scientific ideas by establishing an aquarium. Chapters alternate mainly between 1940 and 1998, with the latter conveying some of the humor and challenges in running the facility; the author herself has worked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the descriptions of marine life are sensuously precise. Overall, Hatton shapes a jagged coming-of-age and growing-old story with fine vignettes held together by Margot’s pluck and her commitment to feelings and memories that matter deeply.
Along with creating a fully realized, realistic heroine seen across decades, Hatton is a writer of often exceptional prose, sometimes overwrought but always thoughtful.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-678-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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