The Hills make amiable companions, but after awhile charm alone is not enough to sustain interest in a narrative of small...
A bucolic if bittersweet summer-long family reunion takes place nine years after a similar reunion that marked Clark’s first novel in her trilogy about the Hills family of Towne, Mass (The Hills At Home, 2003).
Matriarchal Aunt Lily, 75, is running a thriving fruit and vegetable stand business. She has invited her niece Ginger, languishing with cancer, to stay in her comfy big house for the summer along with Ginger’s daughter Betsy and six-year-old granddaughter Sally. Sally quickly makes friends with Cam, daughter of Cambodian refugees who run a local Italian restaurant. Much of the novel follows the children’s play, which is remarkable for its 1950s-like innocence and its precocity. Ginger’s brother Alden (abandoned by his wife in A Way From Home, 2005) lives down the road. Shortly before July 4th, his three sons, two of them immensely successful techy entrepreneurs traveling in their own Winnebago, also arrive to spend the summer. So does his daughter Julie, who lives in England. She announces that she is engaged to a British geologist and wants to have the wedding at Lily’s house in early September. Preparations begin with much to-do although Julie’s vagueness about the absent groom leads to half-serious speculation among her brothers and their girlfriends that perhaps the wedding is a sham. Clark richly, albeit romantically, captures the minutia of small town life and the complicated dynamics of family. The Hills suffer minor—very minor—altercations and misunderstandings. They sell vegetables and have wonderful, leisurely meals. They read Trollope and C.S. Lewis. With help from Sally and Cam, Julie finds the perfect wedding dress. Real sorrow exists here—Ginger clearly is slipping toward death—and all the characters display prickles and pettiness at times, but good-heartedness and New England virtues prevail. In this idealized contemporary world, even the twentysomethings’ worst expletive is “flip.”
The Hills make amiable companions, but after awhile charm alone is not enough to sustain interest in a narrative of small moments lacking forward momentum.Pub Date: June 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42329-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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