Pass on this one even if you like the shore.
Lucy Kincaid, a Nashville bar manager who wanted to go to art school, brings her mother’s ashes and German shepherd, Dolly Parton, to a town on the Virginia shore she’d never heard of until recently.
Just before Beth died of brain cancer, she told Lucy she had just inherited "some property" in Virginia, which would now be Lucy's. Lucy didn't know her mother had ever been to Virginia and wonders what the secrecy is about. The property turns out to be Winter Cottage, a mansion on hundreds of acres. Taylor (The View from Prince Street, 2016, etc.) takes more than 350 pages to tell readers what they can see coming in the first 30. Lucy meets Hank Garrison, a lawyer who's handling the inheritance and who, coincidentally, will inherit Winter Cottage himself if she chooses not to move in. Within a very short time, Lucy comes to decisions about the house; Hank; a 12-year-old named Natasha who needs a stable home; and her previously unknown father. There are inconsistencies beyond the way Lucy settles in so quickly after Taylor portrays her as too “restless” to stick around. For example, Lucy explores the attic and notes a trunk she can’t open without a key. Dozens of pages later she's back in the attic, where she and Natasha open the trunk just by pressing a button on the lock. Lucy and Natasha also watch videos Beth made of interviews with Winter Cottage’s last matriarch, Catherine Hedrick Buchanan, the woman who left Beth the house. Multiple storylines from past and present are rushed or never quite conclude, such as the identity of human bones found near Winter Cottage and the events that have driven Hank to want to “put everything on the line to bring this town back.” Lines such as “She finished up her eggs and dumped what remained of the veggies in the trash before washing the plate and setting it in the drying rack” are unnecessary to the story. Rather than allowing the action in a scene to illuminate characters' feelings, Taylor tells readers how to view her characters’ emotions, such as “Vulnerability and sadness drained the energy from Natasha.”
Pass on this one even if you like the shore.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0388-3
Page Count: 371
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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