Sweet, clever, and fun.
How a kid can help her broke, widowed, overwhelmed mom: write a novel!
Aristotle "Aris" Thibodeau carefully follows the advice in Write A Novel In Thirty Days!, a book she receives as a gift for her 12.5th birthday from her mother, whom she calls Diane. She divides her autobiographical narrative neatly into sections: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Denouement. She limits herself to one use of hyperbole, avoids superfluous characters, and tries her best to heed the warning that "two flashbacks in one chapter might kill sales." In her writing studio, which is the space under her bed, she has posted the recommended motivational sticky notes to remind herself why she took on this project: to avoid therapy, to attract a man for Diane, and to make money. She truly becomes a writer on Page 140, when the English teacher she's shared her work in progress with says "I like your novel." Instant, total bliss! Then the teacher asks, "When is your protagonist going to face a situation she can't handle, the outcome of which will change her life?" Darkness descends: "She hated it!" Sumner (The Ghost of Milagro Creek, 2010, etc.) obviously knows what she's talking about, and of course the complications the teacher calls for are just around the corner. Including exercises from Write A Novel In Thirty Days!, excerpts from Diane's purloined journals, text messages with Aris' so-called long-distance boyfriend, and student essays from Diane's classes at Kanuga Christian College, this book may appeal to younger readers as much or more than gnarled sophisticates. The central adult characters, Diane and her friend Penn, the family's nanny, handyman, and "PMI"—positive male influence—both belong to AA and have been through the wringer, but through Aris' eyes, they are inevitably somewhat idealized.
Sweet, clever, and fun.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87347-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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