Smart, funny, and compulsively readable: this one may finally win the underrecognized author the wider audience her talent...
Two very different sisters, their post–World War II cosmetics business, a swashbuckling pirate novel, and a dead dog with a shoe fetish are among the wildly disparate ingredients Pywell (Everything After, 2006, etc.) stirs into a zesty fictional stew.
The author throw us off balance from the get-go, as older sister Lilly opens the story by revealing that she’s dead. She wants us to know she’s not as reckless as little sister Neave will shortly tell us, even though the narrative counterpoint between the siblings soon makes it clear that Lilly is dead because of her poor judgment about men. Neave initially takes us back to Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1936, when the bookish 11-year-old begins reading aloud to elderly, wealthy Mrs. Daniels. When she helps herself to a book from the shelf her employer has told her to stay away from until she’s less young and impressionable, Neave discovers the addictive pleasures of romance fiction. The Pirate Lover adds a third narrative strand with its tale of inevitably young, inevitably gorgeous, inevitably poor Electra, who is in danger of being married off by her mother to a wealthy nobleman in the glittering Paris of the vaguely Napoleonic period favored by romance writers. Pywell knows the genre conventions, but she tweaks them to paint a very dark picture of male-female relationships (the nobleman is an out-and-out sadist) reinforced by Lilly’s checkered marital career (second husband Ricky is particularly scary). Male menace is countered by female empowerment as the sisters build Be Your Best cosmetics to provide an income and self-respect for the women who sell its products. The plot verges on zany—don’t even ask about the dead dog—but Pywell also crafts mounting suspense that overwhelms any readerly skepticism. And thank goodness her tough, unsentimental take on sexual and familial power dynamics is softened by the fortuitous arrival of decent men for both Electra and Neave.
Smart, funny, and compulsively readable: this one may finally win the underrecognized author the wider audience her talent deserves.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10174-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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