Soodak’s first novel, about an affluent New York mom and her rocky relationship with her own mother, considers several mother-daughter parallels.
Kara, born out of wedlock to a talented songstress and a brilliant composer, found life with her mother difficult. Her mom was both gorgeous and boozy, and treated her more like a girlfriend than daughter. Kara ached to leave her small town in Ohio behind and migrated to New York City, which held the key to everything she wanted in life. Of course, the thing she wanted most of all was Oliver, a rising young star in the art world; but a lasting relationship with Oliver wasn’t possible, and Kara soon finds herself recast as a mother, wife and businesswoman. Told partially in flashbacks that take Kara back to her childhood with her temperamental mother and her college days with the careless and sometimes emotionally cruel Oliver, the book opens with Kara finding the now-famous Oliver’s paintings exhibited in a nearby gallery. Married to a successful businessman, Michael, and the mother of three, Kara partners in a children’s hair salon, employs a nanny who lives in the couple’s small studio apartment next door to their place and befriends novelist Morgan, who cheats on her husband with a stranger. While Kara explores her mother issues and deals with nanny problems from her perch high in an expensive building, she gradually becomes aware that her daughter, Henny, is having problems at school. Set against the backdrop of the Big Apple, which Kara clearly loves, the book examines Kara’s life of pedicures, lattes and play dates in writing that flows. In the end, though, the most interesting parts of the book aren’t set in Kara’s present, in which she comes off as shallow and self-indulgent, but in her past, dealing with her drunken mother and crush on a man who was, at best, self-serving. Although Soodak’s portrait of a privileged upper-class New York mom rings true, once Kara crosses from college student to frazzled yuppie she ceases to be interesting and sympathetic.
Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-57426-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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