Watts’ gently told story, like Fitzgerald’s, is only superficially about money but more acutely about the urgent,...
The Great Gatsby is revived in an accomplished debut novel.
Winner of a Pushcart Prize and other awards for her short fiction, Watts (We Are Taking Only What We Need, 2011) spins a compelling tale of obsessive love and dashed dreams set in a struggling North Carolina town. The furniture industry that once served as the major employer has shifted its factories to Asia, leaving former workers feeling unmoored and depressed. Even those who have jobs—Sylvia, who works for a social service agency, and her daughter Ava, a college graduate who has risen to loan officer in a bank—see that they have fallen far short of achieving the American dream. Watts creates tender, sympathetic portraits of her two main characters, women enveloped in grief: Sylvia’s for her dead son, Ava’s over her inability to conceive the child she desperately wants. Among the town’s inhabitants, only JJ Ferguson seems to have succeeded: in the 15 years since he left Pinewood, he has become an enviably rich man. Suddenly, he has returned, and Sylvia wonders if he wants to show off, to prove that “someone like her, someone black, someone once poor, could come back to town and smash it underfoot.” But revenge is not why JJ is building a mansion on the hill overlooking the town; he has come back for Ava, whom he has loved since they were children. JJ desires Ava with as much passion as Jay Gatsby felt for Daisy Buchanan. If he won Ava’s heart, Sylvia realized, he “thought he could star in his own adventure, be the hero in his own story.” That desire infects all of Watts’ characters, who wish to star in their own stories, however modest. Sylvia simply wants to be a “known person,” to feel “that she had been important to someone.” That need compels her to form a relationship with a prisoner rejected by everyone else in his life. Ava’s overwhelming need is to be a mother.
Watts’ gently told story, like Fitzgerald’s, is only superficially about money but more acutely about the urgent, inexplicable needs that shape a life.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247298-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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