A warm, witty portrait of a woman finally creating the family she deserves.
Unexpectedly pregnant at age 45, Susan Green finds her perfectly organized life turning upside down. And then her mother dies, leaving the family house to Susan’s ne’er-do-well brother, Edward, for as long as he wants to live in it.
Susan has spent her life trying to keep messy feelings at bay. An attorney by training, she’s chosen to avoid the troublesome job of looking after actual people’s problems and instead works as a data analyst in London. Even her love life is carefully choreographed: Instead of dating, she sensibly answered a lonely hearts ad from a well-groomed, well-employed gentleman looking for a companion, and for 12 years, she and Richard spent each Wednesday visiting art exhibits and having no-strings-attached intimate encounters. Once pregnant, Susan ends the relationship, not willing to risk her independence. Yet her mother’s will cracks open Susan’s carefully controlled emotions. Outraged that her drunken brother—the same brother who siphoned off all her mother’s affection and humiliated Susan in grade school—can live in the house for as long as he likes, Susan decides to take him to court to force him to sell it and split the proceeds with her. But unearthing evidence that he inappropriately influenced their mother proves challenging. In this, her debut novel, Haywood concocts a delightful collection of characters to lead Susan out of her emotionally cloistered life. Boozy villain Edward pushes her while his friend Rob, a charmingly disheveled landscape architect, finds himself falling for her as he tries to run interference. Susan also befriends her upstairs neighbor, Kate, whose partner abandoned her with two small children. Haywood deftly twists and turns Susan’s investigation, so each conversation with her gregarious Aunt Sylvia and even her mother’s vicar reveals not only more about her mother’s will, but also more of the secrets she kept from Susan. With new friends Rob and Kate, Susan begins to let her defenses down, accepting real love for perhaps the first time.
A warm, witty portrait of a woman finally creating the family she deserves.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1899-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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