The Wild West earns its name all over again in this lovable chronicle of small-town insanity.
A prodigal daughter returns to her hometown in Montana to make amends; mayhem and hilarity ensue.
When Rachel Flood returns to Quinn, population 956, moving into the ruined trailer bequeathed her by her father, the reception is cool. Her mother, Laverna, who owns a bar called The Dirty Shame, is "surprised that her daughter had shown up to claim the inheritance. Laverna thought of Rachel the same way she thought about the time her appendix had burst—sometimes things could come from inside your body and suddenly betray you, nearly killing you." And that's one of the more positive reactions. Growing up in Quinn, blonde, beautiful Rachel was the town slut, blamed for countless divorces, a murder, and a robbery. Nine years later, she's gotten sober in Alcoholics Anonymous and returned against her sponsor's advice to make amends. The trailer she's inherited is next door to her former best friend, Krystal, who's now shacked up with a horrible, damaged man named Bert, their baby, and Krystal's older child, 12-year-old Jake. Young Jake is debut novelist Fifield's finest creation, his outfits and obsessions (Madonna, Jackie Collins, Erica Kane) laid out in loving detail. "He dressed in satin pajamas, lime in color, and...sprayed his quilt with a bottle of Lady Stetson perfume, another thrift store find, the contents stretched with tap water." Other characters include Black Mabel and Red Mabel—"While Black Mabel dressed to instill fear, Red Mabel would just as soon punch you in the face"; Buley Savage Connor, a morbidly obese, 60-year-old thrift store proprietor; Rocky Bailey, her 30-year-old boyfriend; Martha Man Hands; Jim Number Three; and packs of lesbian silver and talc miners. Several of the above play on The Dirty Shame's women's softball team, whose 1991 season defines the arc of the tale. It includes bar fights and AA meetings, a parade, a wedding, and a black bear, all of which Fifield juggles beautifully until the ending, which feels both inevitable and wrong. Read it anyway.
The Wild West earns its name all over again in this lovable chronicle of small-town insanity.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9738-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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