Bright prose, a plucky heroine, and more than a few plot twists make for a delightful read.
Bullied in middle school, abandoned by her mother, and betrayed by her fiance, Hannah Farr has little interest in exposing her emotional vulnerabilities.
But the new fad of Forgiveness Stones, the brainchild of poet and attorney Fiona Knowles, is impossible to escape. The concept is simple: send two stones to someone you’ve wronged. When they return a stone to you, you have been forgiven. When they send the remaining stone (with its new partner stone) on to a new person, the Circle of Forgiveness expands. Hannah wants nothing to do with the Forgiveness Stones. Her goal is security. Hannah’s scrambled to the top of Louisiana’s ladder for local television anchors, leaping from weekend anchor to evening news to host of her own show. But everything is jeopardized now that young, beautiful, conniving Claudia Campbell is jockeying for Hannah’s job; now that her new boyfriend, mayor Michael Payne, has not only not proposed marriage, but actually encouraged her to seek a job 900 miles away in Chicago; now that Fiona has sent Hannah a velvet pouch of her own Forgiveness Stones, begging absolution for having bullied Hannah in middle school; now that even Dorothy, her best friend (and the mother of her ex-fiance), has embraced Fiona’s scam. Hannah may scoff at the Circle of Forgiveness, but she's willing to use the fad to further her own career. Setting up an on-air Forgiveness Circle among Fiona, herself, and Dorothy (or maybe her own mother) seems like a great idea, but making amends with the past may prove costly. With quirky characters, Spielman (The Life List, 2013) spins an effervescent tale in which betrayals fizzle out into human weaknesses and grudges dissolve into mercy.
Bright prose, a plucky heroine, and more than a few plot twists make for a delightful read.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-14-751676-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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