While her privilege never quite catches up with her, this hapless protagonist will leave younger readers laughing—and...
In Owens’ rollicking debut novel, an indecisive millennial wallows in “voluntary unemployment,” trying the patience of everyone around her.
When Claire Flannery decides to leave her job in “creative communications” to find a career she’s more passionate about, she first has to figure out where her passion actually lies. Her live-in boyfriend, Luke, happens to be a brain surgeon–in-training, and Claire envies his clear-cut path to success. In the meantime, all her friends have climbed London’s corporate ladder, leaving Claire to wonder where she fits in her social circle. Brash but observant, Claire has a tendency to speak without thinking, which lands her in hot water with her mother. Without the emotional support of her parents, Claire begins an inevitable downward spiral, drowning her sorrows in gallons of wine, self-pity, and bad decisions. Thankfully, Owens uses quick, sharp vignettes to move us through Claire’s London, so we’re never asked to wallow with her main character for too long. These sketches have the added benefit of giving us snapshots of Claire’s interior struggle. With trademark 20-something selfishness, Claire has the ability to turn even a toothbrush cup on the sink or a weed growing out of a foundation into a metaphor about her failed life. To her credit, Owens deploys a deft sense of humor to help us laugh at the incongruities of contemporary upper-middle-class crisis. In Owens’ hands, even Claire’s long-overdue visit to a dentist results in a misunderstanding that sums up the shame, absurdity, and hopefulness of the overskilled, underemployed worker. Since Claire already has Luke, Owens frees her character from the constraints of the marriage plot haunting similar rom-com titles like Bridget Jones’s Diary. Rather than, “Reader, I married him,” we get the sense Claire might wind up happily dating a new career, if only she can decide on one.
While her privilege never quite catches up with her, this hapless protagonist will leave younger readers laughing—and wincing—in recognition.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8881-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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 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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