There may be man caves where Sumell’s freshman effort will be proudly displayed and even read, but based on “OK,” he looks...
Holden Caulfield meets Andrew Dice Clay in this debut featuring 20 closely linked stories with a single narrator and a chunk of his life rendered in a coarse, pugnacious style.
Alby introduces himself during a fight with his sister about loading the dishwasher that calls up memories of their mother’s last days with cancer. Family dominates the stories when Alby isn’t describing his drinking, fighting, pets, sex life and lousy jobs. Filtering isn’t for him, so sentences and paragraphs unroll in minicatalogs. A list of roadkill he has seen is followed by: “My mother had cancer,” and then: “I came home, held her hand, pushed her pain button, did her nails and fluffed her pillows, brushed her teeth and emptied her piss bag.” The story “Making Nice” starts with a paragraph of sentences about misbehavior and violence from ages 5 to 21. Yet a story about nursing a baby bird reveals Sumell’s absurdist humor and a softer Alby, who believes he’s raising a fierce raptor and even orders a falconing glove online, only to learn he has rescued a cardinal. Another animal will help an older Alby see what has sustained his dark side when he confronts the death of his dog and the attendant pain—“My heart a pond in a hailstorm”— making him wonder about “the force by which my mother’s death impacted me.” Something human is emerging from the rough specimen who found so much ugliness while growing up in the white suburbs of Long Island. By the long penultimate story, “OK,” Alby has matured enough to enjoy a day with his father in a touching tale, the book’s best.
There may be man caves where Sumell’s freshman effort will be proudly displayed and even read, but based on “OK,” he looks set to produce better, more broadly appealing work.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-093-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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