Ambitious but unconvincing mix of uplift, tragedy and cartoonish satire.
Debut novelist Gibson attempts to combine a snarky lampoon of super and nouveau riche cultural striving with a heartfelt coming-of-age story. She throws in a metafictional critique of metafiction for good measure.
In the Long Island, N.Y., town of Fox Glen, the wealthy, generally doltish residents vie to show how highbrow they are. So it’s not much of a stretch when a sweetly boorish bra-manufacturing magnate and his cartoonishly cold wife hire a writer to create a book for their daughter Carley’s sweet-sixteen party. The book will be a cultural coup. Besides, Carley’s teachers have complained about her lack of intellect, and Carley’s parents hope that involving her in the writing will prove motivating. Overweight Carley hates books and has few friends except Hunter—a big exception since he’s the most popular boy in the high school. A handsome if sickly lothario who drinks to serious excess when he isn’t reading or working on his application essay for Princeton, Hunter considers Carley his best friend and depends on her for all his platonic emotional needs. Her feelings are less platonic, and she repeatedly forgives him for behaving badly under the influence. Bree, the starving author of a novel, is hired to write Carley’s book, thanks to Justin, a famous writer living in Fox Glen seclusion since a fan attacked him. Justin knew Bree in college, treated her badly and has been secretly atoning every since. As Justin and Bree skirt around their relationship, they genuinely try to help Carley, but Carley cannot face that Hunter’s addiction to alcohol and drugs is becoming worse. The drunken scenes, the acting outs and the apologies repeat themselves in various forms until the reader loses track. Hunter’s downward spiral is offset by various witticisms surrounding Carley’s SAT vocabulary malapropisms; the excessively obnoxious behavior of various parents and rich friends; and Bree, Justin and Hunter’s literary debates.
Ambitious but unconvincing mix of uplift, tragedy and cartoonish satire.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-525-95114-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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