Sharp knows how to create wonderfully quirky characters and set them against each other in bizarre situations. But this...
This time out, Sharp gets as preachy as her pro-life antagonist, in a compelling but decidedly one-sided exploration of the abortion issue.
The Daigles are a family of fiery Louisiana Catholics transplanted to the bleak prison town of Stein in upstate New York. In the summer of 1977, it becomes clear that widowed mother Marguerite is losing her battle against the bottle. The more Marguerite drinks, the more her older daughter, teenaged Mahalia, gravitates toward Isabel Flood, neighborhood busybody and humorless antiabortion zealot. Without especially liking Isabel or her ideas, Marguerite nevertheless lets her exert ever-greater influence over Mahalia's life. In fact, when Marguerite goes off with boyfriend David Slattery to dry out, she leaves both Mahalia and pesky eight-year-old Penny in Isabel's care. In one hilarious scene after another, Isabel drags the sisters along on her daily rounds to convert the town's weaker-willed denizens. Little Penny fights her every step of the way, singing dirty versions of "Barnacle Bill The Sailor" at the most inappropriate moments. When Marguerite finally returns home, sober and married, she must fight Isabel for Mahalia's affection. Assisting in this effort is her salty but big-hearted brother, F.X. Molineau. Matters come to a head when Isabel and her fellow right-to-lifers discover that the high school is teaching a poem on abortion called "The Mother." Not only do they picket the school and pass our gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses, they break into the library and pour pig's blood on the free-speech display.
Sharp knows how to create wonderfully quirky characters and set them against each other in bizarre situations. But this latest effort shares the central flaw of its predecessor (Crows Over a Wheatfield, 1996): she just can't resist pouring on the ideology.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6266-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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