A tender story that falls just short of the mark.
A debut novel about The Lavenders, a magical bakery tucked away in the streets of lower Manhattan, and the people who call it home.
Thirteen-year-old Walter Lavender Jr. has a motor disorder that's left him unable to speak, but he also has a nearly supernatural ability to find lost things. The thing he's most passionate about finding is his father, an airline pilot whose plane went missing en route to Bombay three days before his son was born. When a powerful book that's always been kept in the bakery—a seven-page gift from a mysterious customer—goes missing, Walter’s abilities are put to the ultimate test. Without the Book, the dragon pastries that once breathed smoke (much to the customers' amazement) suddenly fall limp and inanimate. Soon the customers stop coming. When a greedy new landlord doubles the rent, Walter sets out on a hero’s journey to recover the Book and save his mother’s shop. As he goes about his adventures, Walter encounters a vibrant, typically New York–ish cast of characters, from a junkman living in a pseudo-magical tunnel system beneath the city to a Chinese woman fallen on hard times who collects bottles for deposit money. As Walter tracks down the Book, now scattered into pages, he learns lessons from everyone he meets, and as the story winds to a close he has found a whole new sense of himself. Keller’s style is simple and often beautiful, and she infuses the novel with flashes of subtle humor and mouthwatering descriptions of sugary confections. But her prose can be weighed down by synonyms, and the device of having Walter meet stranger after stranger during his quest for the Book loses momentum halfway through, as the conversations and characters begin to feel a bit too invented, even for a fanciful read.
A tender story that falls just short of the mark.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1078-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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