Quaint snapshots of Southern living does not a novel make.
There’s not enough Southern charm in the world to compensate for the tedium in Dalby’s fourth installment of his Piggly Wiggly series.
Second Creek, Miss., is one of those special small towns that only exist in fiction, in which well-mannered tradition and radicalism are honored equally. In this latest chapter of the saga, Mr. Choppy Dunbar (former owner of the Piggly Wiggly, defunct since the big-box stores arrived out on the interstate) is starting his first term as mayor, and his new wife Gaylie Girl has come up with a plan to revitalize business in the town square—a Christmas Eve performance of the town’s various choirs. The choirs will be perched on the second-story balconies of the square’s historic buildings, a charming scene Gaylie Girl hopes will become a seasonal tradition. The Nitwitts, of which Gaylie Girl is a member, is an organization of senior ladies that get things done, and they are happily handling the arrangements. There are a few dilemmas: Lady Roth insists on singing a solo but is persuaded instead to march the widow’s walk of the courthouse dressed as the star of Bethlehem; one of the town’s black churches refuses to participate; and there is some heated debate as to which choir will perform “O Holy Night.” Everything is going well until a fire destroys half the buildings in the square a week before Christmas. It turns out Gaylie Girl's son may be to blame (he bought and was renovating one of the buildings for an art gallery—a space heater may have started the fire). How will they save the spirit of Christmas? A few subplots wander in and out—Mr. Choppy’s secretary’s baby was born prematurely and is in the NICU; fellow Nitwitt Wittsie is quickly failing from Alzheimer’s; Lady Roth reveals her true colors—but these barely buoy the sinking ship of a plot.
Quaint snapshots of Southern living does not a novel make.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15677-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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