Animates the Vietnam era with sharply drawn characters and intricate storylines.
College friends come of age in the turbulent 1960s and ’70s when they confront their private demons in Sharp’s novel.
With her vibrant personality and strong will, Lucy Funaro (an uninhibited seductress) exemplifies the drive to succeed among the initially idealistic young adults of Sharp’s (The Duke Don’t Dance, 2012) latest. She headlines the cast in a kaleidoscopic review of 1960s politics, promiscuity, rampant drug activity and assassinations. Lucy and her constant companion, Camilla Benenati, both undergraduates, banter with grad students Shane and Connor Stephens and Connor’s roommate, Gil Gardner, at a sports bar in Princeton in the summer of 1963 and bond almost immediately, setting in motion enduring friendships. The group gradually expands to include Lucy’s older brother, Ira; Ira’s girlfriend, Ava (who marries and divorces Ira); Balinda, who marries Shane; and Sarah, married to Connor. The wide-ranging novel supports intelligent characters and a complex, lucid plot. The action continually shifts among the friends in American cities, Southeast Asia, Spain and South Africa. Ira hopes to build a career in Southeast Asia, and Shane accepts an assignment there in 1969 mainly to honor Connor, an Air Force officer whose plane crashed on a reconnaissance mission in 1967; what happened to Connor remains unknown until 1974, when a South Vietnamese acquaintance of Shane's locates what is left of the plane and its pilots. A brisk narrative pace holds the reader in thrall, most particularly in the several chapters that chronicle Lucy’s fate and the hopeless war in Vietnam. It’s clear that Sharp writes from personal knowledge of every locale, as well as of the war itself. In fact, the novel fascinates due to the writer’s skillful rendering of the era. The most intriguing device in Sharp’s prose is the one-line character sketch, an efficient, vivid use of language in a narrative otherwise so dense, it’s wise to take notes.
Animates the Vietnam era with sharply drawn characters and intricate storylines.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492722922
Page Count: 374
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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