Reflective, evocative, and quietly moving.
Hulse follows up her strong debut (Black River, 2015) with an even stronger novel about the fallout from an act of domestic terrorism.
When Josephine Faber learns that her brother, Samuel, has fled after bombing a Montana district courthouse, it caps the string of losses that have shaped her life. Her father was killed in a mine collapse when she was a baby, and an enraged ex-boyfriend shot and killed their mother when Jo was 10 and Samuel, 17; a stray bullet left Jo paralyzed. Samuel’s terrible act—12 people at a nearby storefront church were injured, and the pastor’s young daughter is in critical condition—was provoked by the impending loss of their house, about to be torn down by the state to build a new highway. Jo is horrified but not surprised; Samuel was a virulent racist in high school, and although he burned his Nazi flag and wears long-sleeved shirts over his swastika tattoo, she’s aware that his anti-government ideas remain the same. But her brother has tenderly cared for her for more than a decade, and she can’t stop loving him. The story unfolds slowly, mingling Jo’s account with Samuel’s explanatory missive to her (written on a map she will later find) and the anguished internal monologues of pastor Asa Truth, whose faith has been badly shaken by his daughter’s injuries. He won’t get any help from Jo, a confirmed nonbeliever since her mother’s death, but they form a bond forged by mutual grief; Jo’s connection to protective Sheriff Hawkins is another relationship Hulse limns with sensitive acuity. Several harrowing scenes underscore Jo’s vulnerability due to her physical disability, but she still rides a cherished mule and tends to outdoor chores thanks to the various devices Samuel has rigged. Her struggles to paint pictures more meaningful than the pretty, sanitized canvases she sells to tourists form another strand of Hulse’s dense yet lucid narrative. The nail-biting denouement is violent yet restrained, an additional sign of this young writer’s mature artistic powers.
Reflective, evocative, and quietly moving.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-14647-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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