Skillfully written.
On the day Californians cast a groundbreaking vote, a doctor is confronted with situations that compel her to contemplate her past, present and future in Richmond’s (The Year of Fog, 2007, etc.) contemporary novel.
Dr. Julie Merrill’s having a bad day, and it’s a real doozy. The document officially ending her marriage to husband Tom has just been signed, her pregnant sister, Heather, has gone into labor across town, her Jeep’s been vandalized while Californians swarm to the polls to vote on secession, and she’s injured her foot. To top it off, a veteran suffering from PTSD—whom she once considered a friend and confidant but who then turned into a frightening stalker—has resurfaced, and he’s now holding some of her fellow workers hostage at the VA hospital. The story takes place during the course of one day and teeters back and forth between past and present as Julie hobbles to Heather’s side at the VA hotel, tries to maintain a phone conversation with the gunman to keep him from harming people, and reflects upon her humble beginnings and broken marriage. At the core of Julie’s life is an event that’s caused years of estrangement between the sisters, destroying Julie’s solid marriage and triggering Heather’s enlistment in the Army and deployment to Afghanistan. But when Heather shows up pregnant and asks for help, Julie can’t deny the bond that exists between them. Richmond creates an exciting premise and uses an unusual approach to develop the plot. Rather than a narrative that reflects a sense of urgency and tension produced by the hostage-taking and secession scenarios, Julie’s past and her relationship with the other characters are scrutinized as the clock ticks. It’s an interesting and sometimes-disturbing study exploring how a person’s anticipated path can change and examining the choices people must make in order to move forward.
Skillfully written.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-34328-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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