Debut novelist Creech offers a romance embroidered with magical realism, yet the magic lacks, well, magic.
For generations, the Lenore women have crafted an enchanted perfume, but the return of the prodigal daughter—heralded by teeming blue dragonflies—threatens to break the spell.
It all began when Serena Lenore eloped with Dr. Alex Danner and moved to Borneo, where they raised two daughters in exotic bliss. Just before returning to the U.S., Serena discovered a rare variety of gardenia that seemed to respond, sentiently, to her touch, releasing a beguiling perfume. Once home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, she develops a rather magical perfume: Whoever wears it experiences success. Cleverly, Serena and her female descendants build a business, choosing discreet clients. Now, her granddaughter, Willow, is the matriarch of the family. Her older daughter, Mya, stands to inherit the business, given that she has stayed home, tending to Willow and the plants. Her younger daughter, Lucia, unfortunately, has no facility with scents and left the farm years ago to pursue an acting career. But now her marriage and career have fallen apart, and she has nowhere to go but home. Home, where Willow is forgetting things and Mya is tempted to change the perfume formula to get rid of a troublesome client. Tinkering with the elixir, however, risks invoking Serena’s curse. Once Lucia arrives, she begins to exhibit talents that may make her Mya’s rival. Willow’s emotions can cause storms to rise and tree branches to fall, Mya can concoct magic potions, Lucia begins to see ominous black clouds over a certain doomed character, and the flowers themselves are charmed, but these elements seem incidental. And while the characters certainly have romances—even Willow discovers a long-forgotten love—the romance seems rote.
Debut novelist Creech offers a romance embroidered with magical realism, yet the magic lacks, well, magic.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-230752-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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