Maudlin, melodramatic and predictable, but the author knows how to make her characters’ suffering wrench readers’ hearts.
Family-damage specialist Greenwood (Two Rivers, 2009, etc.) tackles a really big trauma—coping with a loved one’s death from anorexia.
The Masons are floundering. Successful novelist Sam and his actress-turned-caterer wife Mena have stopped making love and communicate with strained politeness. Their 16-year-old son Finn is into drink, drugs and general misbehavior. In desperation, Sam drives the family to spend the summer at the Vermont lake cottage where they vacationed until Finn and twin sister Franny turned 12. Although the author teases readers for many pages with coy hints about the cause of Franny’s death seven months earlier, it’s obvious early on that the budding ballerina had an eating disorder. In Vermont, the surviving Masons individually deal with their grief and guilt. Sam researches a book on a starvation experiment and tries an herbal remedy for his lack of sex drive. Mena cooks platters of her Greek specialties, gets a starring role in a community theater production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love and carries on a flirtation with her costar. Finn is angry and sullen until he begins a friendship with Alice, whose father is in prison for beating her mother. (The sweet 15-year-old reminds Mena of Franny, a plot point that will prove significant.) Finn worries about running out of his herbal crutch until he begins tending a field of marijuana that Alice has stumbled on; the sensory and emotional immediacy in these scenes make them the novel’s most memorable. Meanwhile, troubled Dale Edwards, who has been obsessed with Sam since she read his novels as a teenager, decides to seek him out. (She figures out his location with clues garnered from Franny’s personal website and various Internet searches.) Dale’s eventual arrival, after a road trip during which her mental state unravels, provides the external catalyst for the Masons’ healing.
Maudlin, melodramatic and predictable, but the author knows how to make her characters’ suffering wrench readers’ hearts.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7582-2878-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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