A novel with barely a wasted word or an emotion that doesn’t ring true.
A taut, masterfully controlled and profoundly moving novel about family ties—blood or otherwise.
The prologue to the third novel by Lasser (All I Could Get, 2002, etc.) begins ominously, in New York, on the morning of the day that the chapter title identifies simply as “9/11.” “What a glorious day,” thinks 41-year-old Kyle, a bond trader who has done so well for himself that he plans to retire in four years. He has just paid for his sister, Cat, two years older, to come visit him from Detroit, and the two commemorate the death of their mother so many years ago. Kyle reveals that a woman with whom he had recently ended a passionate affair has a baby son, apparently his. So life goes on, until it so abruptly doesn’t, for Kyle and for his former lover, who also dies that day, leaving Cat to come to terms with the fact that her beloved brother may well have left a son behind. Cat also has a son, from a marriage that was a mistake, and a father from whom she isn’t quite estranged but with whom she isn’t particularly close. As the novel unfolds at a matter-of-fact pace, wallowing neither in melodrama nor sentimentality, chapters alternate between those in which Cat’s life unfolds and those featuring her father, who wants to reunite with her, a year after his son’s death, for a ceremony of the Jewish faith in which neither of them believes, “paying reverence to an unknown God, often in a language they could not understand.” By then both father and daughter have secrets they’re reluctant to share. In the wake of shattering loss, they must pick up the pieces while negotiating the delicate balance between holding on and moving on. In the process, they rediscover the essence of family, how it helps them to “handle life, the way it unfolded, uncertain and unknowable.”
A novel with barely a wasted word or an emotion that doesn’t ring true.Pub Date: June 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27119-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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