Another bold step forward for a “traditional” writer who seldom fails to make the long-ago and faraway seem as near as the...
The conventional theme of an unspoiled paradise threatened by progress is treated with keen intelligence in the Scottish author’s ninth novel.
It essentially resembles her acclaimed historical novels The Sea Road (not reviewed) and Voyageurs (2004) in that it’s set in a remote place and involves elemental contests of will between strongly imagined characters. The year is 1831, and the (somewhat minimal) plot pits sisters-in-law Lucy and Diya Geddes and their three children (Lucy’s fatherless son Billy, widowed Diya’s daughters Breesha and Mally) against two strangers who arrive at Ellan Bride, a small island near the Isle of Man, where Lucy has assumed the lighthouse keeper’s duties formerly performed by Diya’s now-deceased husband. The initially unwelcome visitors are surveyor Archibald Buchanan and his assistant, Ben Groat, employed by Robert Stevenson (who, as readers of Bella Bathurst’s popular historical study The Lighthouse Stevensons will recall, was the grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson). The two are to study the possibility of building a new lighthouse on the island. If their mission is accomplished, the fragmented families of roughhewn, pragmatic Lucy and gentle, abstracted (Indian-born) Diya will surely be dispossessed. Resulting complications affect both intimacies that develop, over a taut three-day span, among the four adults, and the children determined to protect the pristine haven they have grown to love. Elphinstone’s descriptions of Ellan Bride’s topography and climate, flora and fauna, are as lovely as they are precise, and the range of characterizations developed within her novel’s small compass is quite remarkable. But the story feels somewhat over-familiar, and there are perhaps a few too many echoes of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and D.H. Lawrence’s tense novella, “The Fox.” Still, Elphinstone works subtle variations on the themes of illumination, enclosure and fulfillment, and the narrative holds the reader’s interest throughout.
Another bold step forward for a “traditional” writer who seldom fails to make the long-ago and faraway seem as near as the matter of our own everyday lives.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-84195-880-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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