Witty, discerning, and laugh-out-loud funny.
A wonderful collection of nine stories combining wry humor, engaging characters, and shrewd psychological insight.
It’s hard to pick a favorite here, but one of the best (and funniest) stories is “Love and Heuristics,” in which a man named Jonah, both hapless and clueless, can’t figure out why he can’t keep a girlfriend—especially since he’s thrifty enough to buy Valentine’s candy a day late at 50 percent off (which he gives to his current girlfriend on Feb. 15) and won’t give flowers because “they just die.” In other words, he doesn’t have a romantic bone in his body—and things get even worse when he starts to rely on advice about women from the office Lothario. The story that gives the book its title introduces us to Ethan, who finds himself drawn to Maggie, the girl next door and his daughter’s swimming teacher. Unfortunately, everything starts to go wrong in Ethan’s life: the position he wanted has been filled by the 27-year-old son of the company’s CEO, and Ethan’s nephew, Scudder, a graffiti artist (“Yo, it’s not vandalism. It’s freedom of expression"), comes to live with them, with comic—and almost dire—consequences. “Girlfriend” focuses on the culture of the recently divorced. While Hannah “seethes” at men in general, she does show some nominal interest in Nicholas when she meets him picking up his children at school: “he was not bad looking, in the simplistic way that any man could be acceptable if you were angling for competence.” But it turns out Nicholas is far more interested in Joyce, Hannah’s mother. And in yet another thwarted love relationship, in “Venus in Fur,” the woebegone George confirms what he always suspected—that his love for Helen can never compete with Helen’s for Millie, her Pomeranian.
Witty, discerning, and laugh-out-loud funny.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945588-02-0
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Four Way
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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