A charming portrait of quirky characters who transcend heartbreak.
One day, 8-year-old Miriam Delaney’s mother, Frances, showed up at her school in nothing but athletic socks. Humiliated and shunned by her classmates, Miriam withdrew deep inside herself, speaking only in whispers.
Under her abusive mother’s thumb, Miriam lost not only her voice, but also all connection to her father, her grandmother, and anyone who might have rescued her. After Frances’ death and a dark encounter in the woods, the now-adult Miriam secludes herself in her home for three years, reducing her social world to best friend Fenella and Boo, a track-suited neighbor whose secret love for Miriam has led him to volunteer as her handyman. At last, at the age of 35, Miriam is ready to leave the house, and her steps lead her into the woods, where she runs into Ralph. A reluctant psychotherapist, suppressed gardener, and father to 16-year-old twins, Ralph has just discovered his wife, Sadie, kissing another woman. Realizing that his marriage, indeed his whole post-college life, has been a sham, Ralph has simply walked away. Miriam and Ralph connect, listening to each other’s stories, giving each other tacit permission to cast off the shells of fake lives. Meanwhile, Sadie, usually obsessed with blogging and tweeting a perfect life, struggles with her own long-repressed attraction to women. Debut novelist Elliott carefully, step by step, draws together the intersecting lives of these people who have let others dictate their identities and storylines. Abusive parents, traumatized children, sexual confusion—all could lead down clichéd, sentimental paths, but just when the tale risks becoming maudlin, Elliott calls up another character, who’s been lurking in the background, underscoring how hyperconnected our lonely world is. As the barriers break down, Miriam, Ralph, and Sadie redraw the lines of relationships, rechart their futures, and rediscover their voices.
A charming portrait of quirky characters who transcend heartbreak.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9929182-6-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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