Reads like a glass of warm milk.
Moore debuts with an empty-nest dramedy about a couple in Burlington, Vt., whose three adult children return home for extended stays during one long but ultimately happy summer.
Oldest daughter Lillian is first to arrive on William and Ginny’s doorstep. With 3-year-old Olivia and baby Philip in tow, Lillian claims she’s just here for a rest, and she does seem exhausted with childcare. In their early 60s, Ginny and William are too polite to press, but the truth is that Lillian left husband Tom back in Massachusetts after he cheated on her with a co-worker at a drunken office party. In anger and spiritual confusion, Lillian finds herself drawn to the new young priest in town. Second son Stephen comes for a weekend visit with his pregnant wife Jane. They live in a Tribeca loft where Stephen makes a living writing book reviews (!), while Jane makes real money managing a financial firm. Ginny is dismayed to learn than Jane, whose intensity and careerism has always put the family off, plans to continue working after the baby while Stephen becomes the stay-at-home dad. Then Jane is forced onto bed rest and must stay in Burlington for the rest of her pregnancy. (Her mother, a divorced psychologist, is introduced early in the book but then drops from view.) Last to arrive is Rachel. A love affair has ended, she’s in debt, and her casting director boss seems unhappy with her work. Then she realizes she’s pregnant but has a miscarriage before she tells anyone. So she drops everything to head home for some family nurturing. William and Ginny, devout but open-minded Catholics, enjoy having the kids around but after awhile the chaos and laundry do get wearying. The mild situations and characters would have been at home on Father Knows Best. Jane goes into labor and might need a C-section. Tom comes to woo Lillian back. Rachel’s boss calls begging her to return to work.
Reads like a glass of warm milk.Pub Date: May 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-09771-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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