Well written and thoughtful, even though it’s hard to root for a character who is her own worst enemy.
Schiavone’s debut literary novel delves into the sad relationships between a single mother and her son and between her and the bottle.
Craig is dead. He was Katie’s husband and father of the surly C.J., but no one seems terribly grieved, since he’d left them for California years ago, taking a dark secret with him. Meanwhile, Katie struggles to raise a teenage son and cobble together a living by tending bar and painting. Unfortunately, Katie has trouble selling her art, perhaps in part because her portraits show people without faces. But she is never far from a stiff drink. One day, Craig’s motorcycle shows up as his parting gift, and C.J. finally sees something to distract him from his anger—if only he were old enough to drive. Katie reeks with self-pity, especially in contrast to her successful sister Caroline, who never fails to point out Katie’s many failings. Their arguments often end with Caroline telling Katie to “call me when you land.” Great-Uncle Walter, terminally ill, abbreviates his suffering by driving the motorcycle into a wall. Too bad, because he was the sane one in the household. Then amid familial chaos, C.J. and the repaired motorcycle disappear. Rather than reporting the incident to the police, Katie simply waits, hoping he’ll write and eventually return. The novel is told in the present tense except for the numerous flashbacks that bring Craig back to life in Katie’s memory. All the characters are deeply flawed and human, but the people readers will likely care about are those who act on their problems. That includes Walter and C.J. Whether it also includes Katie, only patient readers will learn.
Well written and thoughtful, even though it’s hard to root for a character who is her own worst enemy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-57962-221-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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 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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