Tackles but ultimately oversimplifies thorny issues.
A hospice nurse, baffled by her husband’s drastic personality change after his third deployment to Iraq, gleans valuable lessons from a dying World War II historian.
Deborah Birch, who has found her calling caring for dying patients in Portland, Oregon, is the only attendant retired professor Barclay Reed has not yet fired. She wins him over by showing an interest in his life’s work, an unpublished treatise about the only Axis bombing to take place on American soil—in Oregon, when Ichiro Soga, a Japanese pilot, took off from a submarine in a light plane, bent on firebombing the state’s famed virgin timber. Chapters from the treatise are interspersed throughout as Deb reads them to Barclay. Afflicted with terminal kidney cancer, Barclay also suffers from the blows life has dealt: his isolation from family and friends after his academic career ended due to a false accusation of plagiarism. Deb has another troubled soul to deal with at home, her husband, Michael, a Guardsman who survived his first two tours of duty in Iraq comparatively unscathed. After the third, however, he returned exhibiting full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder and has grown cold toward his wife and dangerously irascible. A skilled driver and car buff who works as a mechanic, he's now without wheels thanks to a road rage incident—police impounded his car after he pursued and rammed another driver for parking in a handicapped space. When Deb confides in Barclay, he tells her the key to unpacking the puzzle of Michael’s trauma may lie in studying the code of a warrior. The story of Soga, a descendant of samurais, and his atonement for the bombing is the key to that understanding. The sections concerning Soga and his odd rapprochement with the Oregon town he attacked are often more engaging than the plights of the contemporary characters. Kiernan (The Curiosity, 2013) seeds this saga with occasional sanctimony, bald symbolism, and overly facile epiphanies.
Tackles but ultimately oversimplifies thorny issues.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236954-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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