Brown crafts a complicated tale of moral ambiguity about a woman who couldn't say goodbye to her baby after the paperwork...
A teenage mother disregards the ethics of adoption in Brown's (Doubles, 2010, etc.) challenging new novel.
When 19-year-old college student Maria becomes pregnant, the timing couldn't possibly be worse. Her mother, an English professor and Alexander Dumas scholar, is in the final stage of her battle with cancer, and Maria is neglecting school to serve as her caretaker. The baby's father, Jack, is more concerned with pilfering drugs and reciting Wu Tang Clan lyrics than with the idea of fatherhood. Maria's mother, close to death, finds herself suddenly pro-life, and Maria feels like she has no choice but to give the baby up for adoption, insisting that the records be closed. What her adoption caseworker doesn't know, however, is that the couple Maria chooses to parent her baby is not entirely unknown to her. While flipping through the book of prospective parents, Maria recognizes a couple who lives in Beaufort, North Carolina, where she and her mother visit every summer. After giving birth and spending a week nursing newborn Bonacieux, Maria changes her mind about the adoption, feeling "with absolute certainty that she should keep the child." But having already signed the 60 pages of release forms, she hands the baby over despite her misgivings—and then does everything she can to insert herself into the lives of adoptive parents Philip and Nina, even going so far as to become Bonny's babysitter. What follows is a tricky story about a birth mother who can't extricate herself from her child's life and the unraveling of the family she has chosen for her daughter. While the writing preceding the birth of Bonny is emotionally distant and often enamored with its cleverness, the rest of the novel is well worth the wait.
Brown crafts a complicated tale of moral ambiguity about a woman who couldn't say goodbye to her baby after the paperwork was signed.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61902-459-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
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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