An often colorful and emotional read, particularly for those who enjoyed the author’s previous work.
Schell (Woody, 2016, etc.) tells another tale set in Stonyville, West Virginia, in the second book of his Folksong Suite series.
Ennis Diehl, 13 and gifted, has already skipped three grades, and folks in his hometown of Stonyville expect him to become a doctor. He looks forward to leaving his rural birthplace, if only to escape his tempestuous mother, the acclaimed singer Molly Evangeline, and his mentally disabled 16-year-old brother, Mickey. He inherited his quick wit from his complicated mom, and he’s fiercely protective of his sibling, but his relationships with both can be suffocating: Molly’s exacting standards cause constant domestic strife, and Mickey’s adoration and dependence make him feel like “Mickey the manacle.” These dynamics come to a head when a dispute over a catch during a baseball game leads Ennis to bet that Mickey can beat Stonyville’s athletic champion, Quinn Whelan, in a foot race. Mickey wins, but he collapses from heat stroke afterward, setting off a new battle between Ennis and his mother, and later, a humiliated Quinn gets unwittingly drawn into con artists’ plans to kidnap the Diehl children for ransom. Along the way, Ennis takes solace in spending time with his relatively calm father, Mark Diehl, and his girlfriend, Inga Sandersen; Molly prepares to relaunch her singing career after years out of the spotlight; and Mickey experiences adult responsibilities in a garden-center job and adult desire when he develops a crush. The fictional setting of Stonyville in Schell’s second series installment remains a vivid creation, filled with memorable characters and complex socio-economic dynamics. The conflict between Molly and Ennis is particularly well-drawn, rendering a mother-son battle as a wrenching, believable clash of troubled souls. But although Schell’s lyrical, if occasionally impenetrable, prose style served him well in his previous novel, it’s less suitable for the omniscient, third-person point of view here, as the characters’ voices often sound too similar. For example, when the theatrical Molly says something grandiose, it fits her character, but it feels out of place when 13-year-old Ennis says things such as, “It’s the season of sensibility, summer, so many of us gathering to toast the music of life.” The book’s ending is also too abrupt. Overall, though, this remains a moving account of a family navigating change as time marches on.
An often colorful and emotional read, particularly for those who enjoyed the author’s previous work.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5412-1249-7
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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