An engrossing drama about a man returning home.
A historical novel focuses on a wanderer wondering if it’s time to settle down.
As Stachofsky’s story opens, the main character, Jacob Sparks, has been away from his home and living on the roads and in the backwoods of 19th-century Western Oregon for 15 years, mostly owning only his bow and the Spartan contents of his satchel. Jacob has carpentry skills and a wide array of naturalist talents that have allowed him to live off the land while ambling from town to town. But as the novel begins, it’s 1897, and Jacob is feeling the strain of his many years of itinerant living. He’s hoping to find a kind of home, an easier way of surviving, and these feelings are uppermost when he encounters Fletcher’s Crossing on the Rogue River. He meets the crossing’s watchman, Sam Harris, and his wife, Judith, and their son, Nate, a quiet but hardworking young man. The Harrises offer him food and shelter in exchange for work, and soon Jacob finds himself learning more about the family and even drawing some conversation from laconic Nate. The young man is quick to notice the difference between Jacob and the other drifters who’ve passed through Fletcher’s Crossing. “It’s like you’re looking for something,” he tells Jacob at one point, “or maybe found something and don’t know what to do with it.” This sense of odd potential is magnified when the Harris family errands take Jacob and Nate to the town of Ash Fork, a place the drifter left years ago and with which he has a long and complicated history. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Nate, too, has an intricate link with Ash Fork, and Stachofsky handles the slow, gradual revelations of his plot with an easygoing skill that allows readers to invest in these two characters before their personal revelations come to light. There’s also an adroit balancing of atmosphere—the book effectively evokes the rapid changes engulfing many American towns at the turn of the 20th century—and the deeper undercurrents connecting his cast.
An engrossing drama about a man returning home.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4907-9861-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2020
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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