A novel of stark beauty that leaves moral issues tantalizingly open.
A novel about growing up, growing older and trying to find some accommodation with the past.
Oslo, Norway, resident Ullmann (Grace, 2005, etc.) creates a remote and craggy setting and inhabits it with Isak Lövenstad, an equally remote and craggy personality. Lövenstad is a prominent gynecologist with three daughters, each by a different mother. As his daughters were growing up, they spent time with him at his summer house on the fairly remote—but now increasingly touristy—Baltic island of Hammersö. In 2005 his eldest daughter, Erika, now 39, is going to visit her father on a bitterly cold and blustery December day, and she’s persuaded Laura and Molly, her two half-sisters, to join her. For 25 years all three have been estranged from their father. While the first part of the narrative focuses on Erika’s circuitous journey to the island and on her rocky domestic relationships, it becomes increasingly obsessed with flashbacks to the girls’ summers on the island—part idyll, part nightmare. (Perhaps this fragmentation of time shouldn’t be so surprising considering the author is the daughter of Ingmar Bergman, known for the chronological fluidity of his films.) We learn in particular of a strange boy named Ragnar, in some ways a double of Erika—born on the same day, almost at the same hour—but physically deformed, in contrast to Erika, the most beautiful of the three sisters. Still, Erika feels unaccountably attracted to Ragnar, to his strangeness and to his obvious alienation from society. When they’re both 14, they meet for trysts at his out-of-the-way hut deep in the woods. Eventually, however, Erika, along with her sisters and with some friends she wants to impress, winds up betraying Ragnar in a horrifying way, and at a deep level she feels her father has abetted this betrayal. Her journey back to Hammersö is an attempt to reconstruct, and perhaps atone for, her past.
A novel of stark beauty that leaves moral issues tantalizingly open.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26547-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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