A coming-of-age story hijacked by Grand Guignol.
Murder, suicide, madness and awful food: An artless Welsh child must deal with them all in this dire first novel from Strachan, a resident of West Wales.
Gwenni Morgan dreams every night of flying above her small seaside town in North Wales. Her reasons for escaping the here-and-now are clear. In her cramped home, the 12-year-old must share a bed with her hostile big sister Bethan. A bigger problem is her Mam (Mom). When she’s not burning the pudding, Magda Morgan is on her daughter’s case: Do this; don’t do that. And why must she be so odd? Gwenni is an imaginative child who gives personalities to household objects. Her Tada (Dad), a gentle, passive stonemason, tolerates this, but Magda rules. There is another unhappy family in town. Ifan Evans is a shepherd, his wife Elin a genteel, sympathetic teacher; they have two small daughters. Rumor has it that he abuses his wife and kids; he may even have killed two of their babies in the past. Sometimes Gwenni helps Elin look after the girls, and she’s very good with them. For half its length the novel, narrated by Gwenni, putters along like an old-fashioned YA story. The main activity in town is gossip; the period is the dreary interval between World War II and the arrival of television. The gossips have a field day when Ifan disappears and his body is found floating in the reservoir. Detectives question Gwenni. Two arrests are made, and a minor character kills herself (slashed wrists, lots of blood) before attention shifts back to Gwenni’s family. Mam is becoming increasingly agitated over the dead shepherd. Were they lovers when Tada was off in the war? Skeletons tumble out of the closet in a last-minute rush, including revelations of madness and suicide (wristwork again) one generation back. Gwenni has her first period. When Mam becomes hysterical, calling her Satan, it’s time for the needle. The doctor obliges.
A coming-of-age story hijacked by Grand Guignol.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84767-192-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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