Not the prescription for what ails the modern reader.
Love triangle among three overachieving schoolmates.
Matthew, Ben and Amelia were best of friends during graduate school, until ambition and passion took hold and scattered them in different directions. Amelia and Matthew pair off romantically and set up house in Pennsylvania. Matthew opts to skip practicing medicine and instead chases the buck, accepting a job as junior executive at a huge drug company. Amelia, a philosophy major and journalist, becomes a harsh critic of Big Pharma, and she attacks Matthew at every turn for joining what she feels is an evil empire. As for Ben, he drifts into the background: The brilliant doctor throws himself into clinical research and finding cures for global epidemics. When the ethical chasm between Matthew and Amelia becomes too vast, the two end their relationship. Now it’s Ben’s turn to hook up with Amelia. Amelia hopes that Ben is a man capable of meeting her lofty ethical standards. The trio is thrown back together when a small boy named Cobain (he prefers Danny) wanders into Matthew’s apartment. Danny desperately needs help to get his drug-addicted mother cleaned up and his neglected little sister proper medical care. Matthew is far too obsessed with his career to assist Danny. But when Matthew sees an opportunity to hurt Amelia and salvage a brewing PR disaster at his company, he agrees to support Danny and his sister. But he’ll need some help from his old friends. As Matthew jets around the globe defending his company’s actions, the children’s plight brings the trio even closer. Tucker’s latest (Once Upon a Day, 2006, etc.) offers plenty of modern moral dilemmas but little in the way of remarkable innovations. The novel is strongest when taking on the gray area of bioethics: Matthew’s ability to rationalize his actions makes for the most engaging episodes. However, Tucker ultimately neglects these substantive issues, favoring a tearjerker ending and a sappy romance.
Not the prescription for what ails the modern reader.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7434-9279-9
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
