A mildly uplifting tale full of pleasant imagery, but could have packed more punch.
O’Leary’s debut is a young adult novel about a small town family dealing with the effects of war and tragedy.
Younger brother Cody is the star quarterback and his older brother Boomer is the offensive lineman charged with protecting Cody on the field. Their personalities reflect their on-field duties; Cody is thoughtful and puts pressure on himself while Boomer likes to hit things, not out of anger but for the thrill of contact. The reader can easily picture the pair driving around O’Leary’s old-fashioned Grand Rapids, Ohio, as autumn leaves scuttle across the sidewalk. The author has created likable characters and drawn an engaging portrait of an idyllic American town. The scenery is beautiful, and O’Leary excels at pulling the reader into the setting. The book comes to life in simple scenes such as Cody and his girlfriend Kim playing flashlight tag with their teenage friends in a corn maze. When Boomer makes a life-altering decision to serve with the military in Iraq after his senior year in high school, it’s a natural progression for his character. Indeed, every character fits neatly into the story and plays a part in the larger narrative. O’Leary’s tale is efficient in that way, but this can also make things feel perfunctory; things fall into place a bit too easily, and there are places where the author avoids delving into the conflict in a moment. When Kim visits Boomer in the hospital, the chapter ends just as the two begin a meaningful, telling interaction. A similar situation occurs shortly thereafter when Kim wants to take Boomer’s picture, and he balks and later when Cody tells his brother’s story at a school assembly. O’Leary sets up great moments but stops short of playing them out in the text. These dramatic moments are where the meat of the story is, but the narrative just fills in the action later on. This is part of O’Leary’s approach to a difficult subject, and it helps avoid turning the book into a polemic. But this also robs the narrative of some of its dramatic impact.
A mildly uplifting tale full of pleasant imagery, but could have packed more punch.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0975321614
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Swan Creek
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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