Uneven, but stinging dialogue and sharp insights offer strong foundations on which this novice author can build.
Postwar marriage and motherhood are more complicated than two cousins expected in Klaussmann’s smart, unsettling debut.
In September 1945, Nick and Helena are drinking gin in their backyard in Cambridge, Mass., looking forward to the end of rationing and the beginning of their adult lives. Helena is headed for Hollywood to marry Avery Lewis, Nick to Florida to be reunited with her Navy veteran husband, Hughes Derringer. Part I chronicles that less-than-successful reunion from Nick’s point of view, then moves back to Cambridge as both women become pregnant in 1947. Tiger House, Nick’s family home on Martha’s Vineyard, sees a turbulent summer in 1959 when Nick’s daughter Daisy (this section’s viewpoint character) and Helena’s son Ed discover the corpse of a Portuguese maid. We eventually find out who killed Elena Nunes, but the focus is on simmering tensions within and between the two families as the narrative moves into the 1960s and expands to include Helena’s, Hughes’ and Ed’s perspectives. Restless Nick has casual flings that make both Hughes and her unhappy. Avery, obsessed with a dead movie star, gets Helena hooked on pills and pimps her out to a producer. Passive-aggressive Helena, instead of dumping Avery, blames all her problems on the admittedly bossy Nick and encourages creepily detached Ed to resent Nick too. Daisy gets engaged to a young man who seems far too interested in her glamorous mother. Developments in the Lewis family strain credulity, but Klaussmann’s pitch-perfect portrait of the Derringer marriage gives the novel a strong emotional charge. Nick is frustrated by life as a decorative appendage; Hughes is uneasily aware that the part of himself he’s always held in reserve has something to do with her infidelities. Their complicated, painfully loving relationship and their mutual tenderness for fresh-faced Daisy ring true, while the odysseys of Helena and Ed clang with melodrama.
Uneven, but stinging dialogue and sharp insights offer strong foundations on which this novice author can build.Pub Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-21133-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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