Oddly interesting but unsatisfying, especially if one thinks about it too much.
Barely recovering from her now ex-husband’s arrest for bigamy, Maggie decides to buy a Christmas tree to cheer herself up and winds up meeting the sweet, sexy lot owner who sweeps her off her feet. Until she discovers he has a few dark secrets of his own.
Maggie is a Salt Lake City caterer who retreated from life after her husband was arrested for bigamy. Her friend Carina, who has taken over day-to-day operations for the company, encourages her to get out more or at least bring some life into her home. For instance, through a Christmas tree. When Maggie visits a local tree lot, she is immediately attracted to the owner, Andrew. The two become an item very quickly; he invites her to Mexico, they have an amazing time, they come back. Carina has Googled him. There are Things. To. Be. Concerned. About. Maggie abandons him. She reconsiders. He tells her the truth, then decides she’s too good for him and abandons her. People who love them intervene and try to save their romance. An aside: Maggie’s real name is Agnetha—after the woman in ABBA. Growing up in Oregon, her friends called her Aggie, but in Utah, she changed it to Maggie, since the Utah state university teams are called the Aggies and the name became tiresome. Does this aside sound random? Does the review sound a little choppy and simplistic? There’s a reason. While the book has witty and interesting moments, it reads at times like an encyclopedia of interesting facts (who knew a squid was so terrifying?) and at times like a travel site (readers will want to jump a flight to Cabo), and while we root for Andrew and Maggie, in the end, readers might also wonder lots of things, such as how Maggie wouldn’t have Googled Andrew herself, given all the mysterious clues he drops and her own vulnerabilities; or why Andrew never tells her the truth until he’s decided to abandon her; etc.
Oddly interesting but unsatisfying, especially if one thinks about it too much.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7205-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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