Predictable tale of a working-class homegirl making good on her mistakes.
Tucker (The Song Reader, 2003) delivers another brisk hard-luck saga for undemanding readers.
Narrator Patty Taylor, single mother of a two-year-old, has a good gig as the lead singer for a talented band traveling the Midwest trying to make a name for itself, even though she’s mostly viewed as a meal ticket while band leader Jonathan aims for the higher world of Art. When Rick, the father of Patty’s baby, gets paroled after three years in jail on drug charges, he comes looking to resume their intense first-love romance. Patty has moved on, or so she says, but she can’t make Rick believe it. Backstory: with little education (though she mentions she got her GED before son Willie was born, “so he’d never have to feel like his mother wasn't good enough”), Patty is plagued by a self-defeating lack of confidence, fed by an alcoholic mother who routinely threw the teenager out of the house, blaming her marital unhappiness on her daughter. Rick filled the emotional vacuum in Patty’s life, and he did take care of her, until his arrogant dalliance in drugs revealed an ugly side to his controlling nature. Second-novelist Tucker earnestly tries to allow Patty to grow as a responsible mother and a person with a mind of her own, but the the story is crippled by its caricatures of meanness in Rick, Mama, and even the band’s oily agent, who threatens to fire Patty one minute and sends her flowers the next. The lightweight, fast-moving prose, describing superficial actions with little introspection, makes this feel like a YA. Even Jonathan, perhaps the only character who regards Patty as more than a “dumb chick,” never grows beyond the stereotypes of a stock character. It’s too bad, because readers will like Patty and wish her author had given her more to think about.
Predictable tale of a working-class homegirl making good on her mistakes.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-6446-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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