The current oil-spill crisis only makes the hopefulness of this novel more moving, if heart-wrenching.
In this affective second novel from Story (More Than You Know, 2004), a Dallas-based violinist with the Fort Worth Symphony, New Orleans natives struggle to recover their lives as well as their property after Hurricane Katrina.
Julian Fortier, 36, who left Louisiana years ago to pursue his career as a jazz trumpeter and has had worldwide success, returns to New Orleans to search for his missing father Simon, 76, a retired chef whose house in the Treme neighborhood was ravaged by the hurricane. One of the first people Julian visits is Matthew Parmenter, who owned the high-end restaurant where Simon was chef and who gladly offers to help Julian’s search for him. Julian believes that Matthew, who is white, cheated Simon out of his rightful share of the wealth derived from a packaged version of Simon’s recipe for red beans and rice. When Matthew dies shortly thereafter, leaving his Garden District mansion and his recipe earnings to Simon, along with an apology, Julian must re-evaluate his easy judgments. Julian is also reunited with love-of-his-life Vel, who broke off their engagement shortly before he moved to New York because she refused to leave New Orleans. Now Vel accompanies Julian to Silver Creek Hollow, the Fortier family homestead north of the city where Julian hopes to find his father. Instead he discovers that a disreputable developer is attempting to wrest away the family’s ownership through tricky dealings. Julian has never felt a connection to the land Simon loved, but he begins to understand his father’s attachment. With the help of a fledgling lawyer (the evil developer’s estranged grandson), Julian and Vel fight for the land. Meanwhile Simon lies unrecognized in a hospital. Recovering consciousness, he makes his way back to Silver Creek. Story’s musical background infuses her novel with a lyrical rhythm that smooths the creakier plot machinations as engaging characters rebuild their relationships and their city.
The current oil-spill crisis only makes the hopefulness of this novel more moving, if heart-wrenching.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-932841-55-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Agate
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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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