A tragic turn of events redirects what could have been a predictable romance into a drama on the fragility of love and...
A two-hanky weepy in which a 30-something woman must choose between her vast wealth and a husband she hasn’t really loved in years.
After Michael’s surprise heart attack (he’s not even 40), he becomes a transformed person. His near-death experience showers him with epiphanies—love is all that matters, money is meaningless, the quest for power is corrupting—and decides to act on them. While still in the hospital he informs everyone that he is selling his company, his home, all his possessions (totaling in the hundreds of millions) and donating the proceeds to charity. This does not sit well with his wife Julia. Because of a pre-nup agreement she insisted on (her father, a compulsive gambler, shamed and ruined their family and scarred Julia’s sense of security), she will have no recourse in Michael’s decisions. Hardly a spoiled D.C. wife (in fact the two come from the same poor West Virginia town), she nonetheless would like to keep a roof over her head and the heated floors beneath her feet. Michael asks for three weeks before she files for divorce—three weeks to woo her back and convince her all they need is each other. Much of the novel is devoted to flashbacks of their courtship; as high-school sweethearts they planned on escaping the poverty of their town (and their dire family circumstances) to somehow make it big. But as Michael’s company grew, and her own business took off, they became little more than cohabitors in an ultra-luxe D.C. residence. Julia isn’t quite sure what to make of all the sudden attention Michael is lavishing on her—a trip to Paris, picnics—but she is sure that years of neglect, possible adultery and this current betrayal may simply be impossible to forgive.
A tragic turn of events redirects what could have been a predictable romance into a drama on the fragility of love and marriage.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0982-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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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