In a book written with humor and charm, family members show the best of themselves after the people on their wife and...
McInerney (The House of Memories, 2014, etc.) serves up a satisfying family drama stemming from a fed-up woman finally coming clean in her traditional Christmas letter.
For more than 30 years, Angela Gillespie has been sending out an annual letter on Dec. 1, rife with platitudes about her family that hide a far more complicated picture. But after a particularly trying year, she sits at her computer and tells a different story. When her son, Ig, requires a trip to the emergency room—quite a journey from their home in Errigal, a remote sheep station in the Australian Outback—her husband, Nick, sees the draft on her computer and surprises her by pressing "send" so her missive won’t be late arriving in the inboxes of more than 100 readers. Though Angela was brutally honest in the letter—chronicling her three daughters’ financial, career and relationship woes, her young son’s recent dismissal from boarding school and attachment to an imaginary friend, and her own fears of her husband’s infidelity and emotional distance, as well as his rash decision to make a clandestine deal with a mining company that could wreak havoc on the Outback—for the most part, the family handles the airing of their secrets to friends and family around the world reasonably well. It's Angela’s mention of her fantasies about having chosen a different husband, life and family that truly upsets them. When an accident shakes up their lives, the Gillespies are forced to take on new roles, and the novel gains momentum. McInerney writes with a deep respect for her characters, allowing each the opportunity to help reshape the narrative of next year’s inevitable Christmas letter.
In a book written with humor and charm, family members show the best of themselves after the people on their wife and mother’s mailing list saw them at their worst.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-451-46672-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
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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