The first U.S. publication from Canadian author Winter, this is a highly entertaining and ultimately profound novel of a...
The talented, libidinous and often notorious American landscape painter Rockwell Kent emerges like a fresh scandal in this historical novel based on the life of the man best remembered as the illustrator of Moby-Dick.
Written in the first person, as if Kent were jotting journal notes as they occur to him, the story opens on the eve of WWI when the artist discovers that both his wife and mistress are pregnant. His solution is to leave the family’s cramped Greenwich Village apartment and travel to Brigus, Newfoundland, a coastal fishing village, bidding his wife Kathleen to bring their children and join him after the thaw. (The mistress stays in Boston with a cash settlement that Kent, when the child dies, asks her to refund.) Welcomed in Brigus by arctic explorer Robert Bartlett and a fatherless boy named Tom Dobie, both of whom help Kent shore up a dwelling by the sea, among other neighborly acts to keep him from dying of exposure, the artist settles into the community with the ease of a porcupine in a pup tent. Kent’s socialist leanings and calls for the establishment of unions anger the captains of the fishing industry. His love of German music and poetry leads the locals to think he’s a spy. His refusal to heed warnings or tone down his opinions prompts him to paint a German eagle on his studio wall along with the words “Bomb Shop.” Tensions ease when Kathleen arrives with the spring, until the artist takes up with Emily Edwards, the fiancée of Kent’s young friend Dobie, who has enlisted to fight in the war. The townsfolk simply cannot comprehend the actions of the philandering man who wanders the coast and fields, observing them as they work. A spy, indeed.
The first U.S. publication from Canadian author Winter, this is a highly entertaining and ultimately profound novel of a quixotic man who reveres nature’s awful beauty.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2006
ISBN: 1-59691-025-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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