Hamill the realist prevails (mostly) over the sentimentalist in this above-average entertainment.
Hamill (Forever, 2002, etc.) returns with a gritty Depression-era story about a grief-stricken doctor rejuvenated by an unwelcome challenge: raising his small grandson.
New Year’s Day, 1934: New York is buried under snow. Dr. Jim Delaney, middle-aged, Irish, is summoned to treat Eddie Corso, a mobster shot in a gang war. Delaney and Eddie were in the trenches in France in 1918; the doctor would never forsake him. He gives his friend a morphine shot and smuggles him into the hospital for surgery. When he returns to his home in downtown Manhattan, he finds a boy he’s never seen before; there’s a note from his teenage daughter Grace, pleading for him to take care of two-year-old Carlito; she’s off to Spain to look for her husband, a Mexican revolutionary. Delaney is furious with Grace, the only child he spoiled rotten, in an effort to make amends for his absence in France. His wife Molly never did forgive his volunteering to be a medic; 16 months before she had walked toward the river, never to return. Delaney has been on autopilot ever since as he attends scrupulously to his poverty-stricken patients and makes house calls. Carlito could be the last straw, but the doctor rallies with the help of Rose, an attractive Sicilian immigrant he hires to run his new household. Meanwhile, Eddie’s gangland rival is demanding to know Eddie’s whereabouts. Carlito must be protected, from the patients’ germs inside and prowling mobsters outside. Trying times, but the upside is that Delaney comes alive again, enchanted by Carlito and strongly attracted to the indispensable Rose. Hamill’s story continues strong up to the halfway point, when he runs out of plot. Delaney and Rose eventually become lovers, though Rose seems more at home in the kitchen than the bedroom. Better realized than the lovers is a vanished New York, with its appalling proneness to disease, its rough streets and hectic pleasures.
Hamill the realist prevails (mostly) over the sentimentalist in this above-average entertainment.Pub Date: June 11, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-34058-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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
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
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