An intelligent, heartwarming exploration of the powers of forgiveness, compassion, and new beginnings.
Two women try to move past the 15-year-old legacy of a devastating car accident.
When renovation work on Rae McDonald's Alexandria Colonial home uncovers an old bottle, history buff Margaret McCrae tells her it’s likely from the 1750s and “designed to ward off a witch’s spells and evil curses.” Three intact bottles found recently on properties belonging to families who helped settle the area lead Margaret to wonder if their stories are connected. Researching Rae’s family papers for clues, Margaret delves into the McDonalds' distant past, but Rae is focused on more recent history. When she was a teen, her sister, Jennifer, died in a car crash, and the generally cautious Rae went wild and ended up pregnant. Rae hid the shameful secret from everyone, leaving town to have the baby. Giving her son up for adoption broke her heart, so she buried her emotions, determined not to get close to anyone. Now a teenager, her son has reached out to her for information about his family’s past. Rae has never cared about her family’s history before, but now that she might actually have a legacy beyond her work, she’s interested in learning more. Meanwhile, Jennifer’s best friend, Lisa Smyth, who survived the accident, is back in town to care for her failing great aunt—who has recently uncovered a family mystery of her own—and desperate for forgiveness for her own dark secrets. Margaret’s search will discover long-standing family secrets and connections among three founding families, while Rae and Lisa explore more modern ties that can either bind them forever to a sorrowful past or free them to a hopeful future. Taylor’s complex tale spans three families over two centuries and includes a dose of ancient magic, but the story remains grounded in fascinating history and emotional turmoil that is intense yet subtle.
An intelligent, heartwarming exploration of the powers of forgiveness, compassion, and new beginnings.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-425-27826-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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 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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