Profound, poetic and original. Hermann is a young author to watch.
A subtle, elegiac coming-of-age novel about catastrophe, grief and the persistence of everyday life.
In her stunning debut, Hermann explores the long-term ramifications of unassimilable tragedy in the life of young Ruby Bronstein. Ruby’s father is a Holocaust survivor who cannot remember most of his own childhood; as a young girl she is haunted by the contrast between her family’s warmth and closeness and her father’s silences and occasional withdrawal. Hermann approaches the familiar subject of the Holocaust and its legacies in a completely unexpected and original way, inflicting on her protagonist a series of tragedies that give readers the barest taste of what it means to face and survive unimaginable catastrophe. Early on, Ruby goes with her parents to the prison camp where her father was interred. The events and epiphanies of this sequence might be the crux of another novel, but instead, the trip is the last moment in Ruby’s life before she begins to lose one family member after another to madness and illness. The uncanny repetition of these traumas could easily have strayed into the territory of melodrama, but Hermann’s spare, taut prose strips the story of any sentimentality even as it tensely mirrors Ruby’s tamped-down emotions. The potential for melodrama is further mediated by the novel’s rigorous structure. A series of compressed episodes, any one of which could stand on its own as a short story, chronicle Ruby’s ordinary life as an adolescent and young woman: going to a new school, making and losing friends, experiencing her first crushes, savoring the joys of camp and the first years of college. They delicately illustrate the ways in which grief circumscribes her life and her ability to connect to those she loves, including her surviving family. The novel’s resolution doesn’t quite match the depth and complexity that precede it, but this is an easy fault to forgive in such a gorgeously readable meditation on mourning and survival.
Profound, poetic and original. Hermann is a young author to watch.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6823-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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