Hogan’s characters may be too broadly drawn (one sister so callous, the other so naïve), but she creates a gripping...
In Hogan’s first adult fiction (she has sevenYA titles to her credit), the poisonous relationship between two sisters, and the family dysfunction that grew it, is examined with style and sensitivity.
Muriel had her Sunday planned: She would hole up for hours of binge TV-watching and a tub of popcorn in her Manhattan apartment. But then Pia calls, and Muriel’s day is transformed. As she waits for her older sister’s arrival from Connecticut, Muriel recalls a childhood marked by exclusion and petty cruelties; her older sister was perfect, and their mother, Lidia, made no effort to hide her preference in daughters. Lidia, beautiful and perpetually dissatisfied with her life in Queens, had forced a shotgun marriage on the girls' father, Owen, an engineer who preferred tinkering in the basement to talking with his family. Little has changed in the ensuing years; their parents are remote, and brother Logan has abandoned the family altogether. Pia, with sculpted hair and body, lives in the rarefied air of Westport with a financier husband and accomplished daughter. Muriel is an assistant casting agent with few friends or romantic prospects; she is the moon to Pia’s sun. But when Pia comes for that Sunday visit, it's to confess a secret—she’s dying of cancer and has come to the city to buy a dress to be buried in. Muriel is good at keeping secrets (she never told anyone that Pia nearly killed her on a beach outing or that her mother was having an affair with their priest), and now Pia is asking her to keep this news from Lidia. When the narrative shifts from Muriel's perspective to Pia’s, the malicious older sister is humanized, if not entirely redeemed. Pia’s battle with cancer is vivid and heartbreaking, Muriel’s guilt (for not being lovable) is tragic, though nothing compares to Lidia’s final, scandalous confession.
Hogan’s characters may be too broadly drawn (one sister so callous, the other so naïve), but she creates a gripping narrative of a fractured family.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-227993-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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