This book’s emotional remove is something of an asset, emphasizing the seriousness of the characters’ predicaments without...
The lives of four troubled women converge outside Las Vegas in this follow-up from Bezos (The Testing of Luther Albright, 2005).
This cleverly orchestrated, cool-toned novel opens with Dana, a top-shelf bodyguard, fending off a dog attack without breaking a sweat. The scene serves as a kind of allegory for what Bezos is up to throughout the book: She wants to explore how women respond to threats, and do it free of emotional overreaction. Dana is charged with monitoring Jessica, an Oscar-winning actress who’s compelled to visit her ailing estranged father and care for his dog. The dog brings them into the orbit of Lynn, a recovering alcoholic who runs an animal shelter, and she in turn has taken in Vivian, a 17-year-old prostitute who’s run off with her twin infants to escape her abusive pimp. The setup is pulpy and all the more preposterous for being set in just four days. Yet Bezos’ prose doesn’t dramatize—at times, it’s as removed as a dossier, and a spare image of a black widow spider resting on the car seat where Vivian’s babies sleep is enough to convey her brittle, dangerous milieu. The novel isn’t short on conflict—Dana is struggling to help her boyfriend, who has cancer, and Vivian’s pimp makes an ugly reappearance. But its drama is powered as much by conversation and the women’s interior thoughts. Each woman is impressively rendered for such a slim book, and each is at a different level of flinty no-nonsensehood that Bezos implies is essential to avoid the “traps” of the title—mostly men but also just life itself. Dana, with her low resting heart rate, is the platonic ideal, but Vivian’s complicated but determined escape is equally admirable.
This book’s emotional remove is something of an asset, emphasizing the seriousness of the characters’ predicaments without locking them into the stock, manipulative plots.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95973-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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