A noble attempt to unpack Uruguay’s complexities and one family’s navigation of politics, American meddling, and each other.
A son explores his family’s complicated past and the natural beauty and history of Uruguay, their homeland.
Gabriel doesn’t understand why, after more than 30 years in California, his mother wants to move back to her native Uruguay. Her father died and left her a ranch, or estancia, that she wants to turn into an organic farm, and she wants Gabriel to come with her. Gabriel doesn’t want to disrupt his routine. He has a boring job that pays well, and he likes to go bird-watching. Accompanying his mother to Uruguay is supposed to be temporary. He’ll be there long enough to help her get the estancia on its feet. However, he soon finds himself drawn in by the family members he doesn’t know, the beauty of the land, and a local biologist named Alejandra, who’s looking for undiscovered microbes near the family’s land. The longer Gabriel stays in Uruguay the more he’s drawn into the family’s squabbles over what to do with the land—follow his uncle’s plans to build a large rice plantation and sell into European markets or help his mother achieve her dream of growing organic produce for the local communities? The possible discovery of a new bird species on the family land brings Gabriel and Alejandra closer together and lays the groundwork for their burgeoning relationship. Gaines’ novel is deeply researched, and the reader will walk away with an understanding of not only Uruguay’s repressive regimes and the people killed by the government, but also biomes, bird preservation, rice cultivation, agricultural markets in South America, and more. The author loves Uruguay and desperately wants the reader to feel her same affection for the history, flora, fauna, politics, culture, and the people. Ultimately, her quest to make the reader care for Uruguay gets in the way of the storytelling.
A noble attempt to unpack Uruguay’s complexities and one family’s navigation of politics, American meddling, and each other.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948814-16-4
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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