Despite evocative prose throughout, this morality tale never achieves dramatic lift-off.
Iowa City resident Lovely’s first novel is an overwrought, often excruciating exploration of the ironies unleashed by a young woman’s decision to donate her organs.
Isabel, a botanist, is riding her bike up a hill on a blustery Iowa spring day. At the crest, a gust forces her into the wrong lane, just in time to collide head-on with a pickup truck driven by Jasper, an aspiring blues guitarist and all around ne’er-do-well. As Isabel lies brain-dead in the hospital, her organs are harvested as her mother, Bernice, and husband, Alex, keep horrified vigil. In Chicago, Janet, whose myopathic heart is failing, is the designated recipient of Isabel’s heart. A year after Isabel’s death, Alex’s grief is still raw, but he’s comforted by his kinship with Bernice. He’s disturbed when Janet’s thank-you notes become outright demands for friendship. Bernice, whose closeness to Alex is threatened by a new girlfriend, welcomes chatty e-mails from Janet’s mother Lotta. Post-transplant, Janet returns to teaching troubled youth, while coping with her two boisterous children. Her workaholic lawyer husband David, who lacks caregiving genes, withdraws. Jasper, whose characterization is the most problematic in the novel, morphs from feckless screw-up—he’s underemployed and underappreciated at Best Buy—to a stalker who’s bent on forcing Alex, Bernice and Janet to acknowledge his “role” in the heart donation. Although acquitted at trial, Jasper, sole surviving witness to the accident, withheld one piece of crucial incriminating evidence—he was driving while dialing. In the sections devoted to Jasper, the writer’s contempt for him is palpable. Because he killed Isabel he’s already the obvious villain—the more daunting challenge, ducked here, was to make him an identifiably flawed human. In the absence of a plot, the action is driven largely by Alex’s ruminations, many voiced in long stretches of eloquent but repetitive speechifying.
Despite evocative prose throughout, this morality tale never achieves dramatic lift-off.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2282-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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