A piercing, vivid, and humane story depicting the long aftermath of extreme domestic violence.
Twenty years after a blood bath consumed his family, the only survivor returns to the scene of the crime in an effort to clear the roadblock of the past from his psyche.
Litta, a small island off the coast of Scotland, is a “dark hunk of rock, braced against the wind and the endless rain,” a persuasive setting for this grimly compelling tale. Here, John Baird, a contemptuous, angry man hidden beneath a veneer of controlled charm, surprised Litta’s tiny community one day by massacring his family—wife Katrina, son Nicky, and daughter Beth, everyone except his less-favored son, Tommy—and then killing himself. John’s brother, Malcolm, still lives on Litta, and it’s on his doorstep that Tommy turns up unannounced two decades later, his education, jobs, and girlfriends having failed to pull him into a future beyond the trauma of his family’s tragedy, his father’s taint, and his own pained regrets. Wait (The Followers, 2017, etc.) delivers these events in a narrative that is limpid and frill-free, in keeping with the book’s elemental setting. Delving into John’s psychology, and Malcolm’s, and their father’s before them, she paints a picture of traditional, often unpredictable, disappointed men and their low-level, slowly corrosive abuse of their wives. This generational connection serves its explanatory purpose, but another of the story’s challenging forces is Litta itself, beautiful but isolated and ceaselessly testing its inhabitants’ characters. Memory, masculinity, and survivor’s guilt are picked apart as the novel treads its path, dodging sensationalism and easy resolutions while evoking haunted, inarticulate people in a relentless landscape.
A piercing, vivid, and humane story depicting the long aftermath of extreme domestic violence.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-571-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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