Reminiscent of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Geye’s narrative takes us deep into both...
A father and son bond through several months of self-exile in the remote borderlands of northern Minnesota.
Geye has chosen a complex narrative strategy, one that mirrors the complexity of the relationships he dramatizes. At the center is Gustav “Gus” Eide, who’s distraught at the disappearance of his father, Harry. Gus goes to see Berit Lovig, the narrator of the story and Harry's former lover, to tell her the story of another time Harry disappeared, 33 years earlier, in the winter of 1963-64. At that time Harry and 18-year-old Gus take a canoe trip northward, following the treks previously done by ancient voyageurs, whose fierce independence Harry has come to admire. Unbeknownst to Gus, who thinks they’re taking their voyage into the wilderness to test themselves, Harry has another motive—to escape the unfortunately named Charlie Aas, a local big man about town but also a bully and the secret lover of Harry’s wife, Lisbet. Leaving at the time of year they do, Harry and Gus find the elements lined up against them—ice and snow are among their greatest threats—but Geye is interested in conflicts between men as well as between man and nature, because Harry is convinced that Charlie will be tracking them. And sure enough, eventually Charlie shows up—and he’s both angry and aggressive. As Harry and Gus square off against him, the reader feels that civilization is a very good thing indeed. The confrontation is dramatic and violent and leads to a secret father and son share for years. As the story unfolds in the present day, Gus, now a husband and father himself, reveals his intuitions about Harry and Berit’s relationship.
Reminiscent of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Geye’s narrative takes us deep into both human and natural wilderness.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94646-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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