A brave tale of human generosity and the power and peace that come from heeding the courage of one’s convictions.
A road novel that mixes warmth, empathy, tragedy, and hope.
Southern novelist House’s (Eli the Good, 2009, etc.) new book is a paean to the wisdom of the heart and the remarkable ability of humans to listen to that wisdom despite a lifetime of believing (or preaching) intolerance. The novel opens in the wake of a catastrophic flood that all but destroys a small Tennessee town, as seen through the eyes of Asher Sharp, a Pentecostal preacher. Asher and his 8-year-old son, Justin, save a neighbor from his house as it literally floats down the river; they are aided by two gay men who have recently moved to the area and who lost their home in the flood as well. Asher is moved by the couple’s selflessness and offers them shelter in his own house, but his archreligious wife cannot abide it. The event shakes Asher sufficiently enough to make him question the foundations of his faith and everything he stands for, and as he begins to preach the gospel of tolerance and open-mindedness, he loses the respect of his congregation and the support of his wife, who attempts to wrestle full custody of Justin from him. At the end of his rope, Asher hops in his Jeep and makes a late-night run for Key West—with Justin in tow. There, he hopes to find and make amends with his estranged brother, Luke, whom Asher hasn’t spoken to since he came out as gay 10 years ago. All of this unfolds in a third-person voice redolent of the rich dialect native to the characters in the story; House has an unsurpassed ear for dialogue, and his prose is spare, fluid, and naturalistic throughout. After such a dramatic beginning, the story slows a bit as Asher and Justin arrive in Key West and get settled into a clandestine existence, but the propulsive pace picks up soon after, as the novel speeds toward its conclusion.
A brave tale of human generosity and the power and peace that come from heeding the courage of one’s convictions.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61620-625-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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