An uneven mix of magic and sorrow, from a promising writer.
This second novel by Walsh (The Last Will of Moira Leahy, 2010) centers on two sisters—one with synesthesia and one with a pragmatic outlook—as they recover from the suicide of their mother.
In Tramp, W.Va., 18-year-old Olivia comes home to find her mother, Beth, in the kitchen with the gas oven on and the pilot light off. Olivia refuses to believe it was suicide—after all, her mother often used the oven for heating—but no one else is deluded. How could they be when Beth Moon suffered from severe depression and anxiety for 20 years? Six months later, the family is still reeling: Their father has taken to heavy drinking, Olivia has gone partially blind from staring at the sun, and sister Jazz has found herself a job in, of all places, a funeral home. Because of a dream, Olivia wants to take her mother’s ashes to the Cranberry Glades. Beth, an aspiring writer, got pregnant in college and was subsequently disowned by her father. In between bouts of depression, Beth was writing a fairy tale set in the Glade—an unfinished story about identity and forgiveness. Olivia thinks some destiny will be fulfilled if she brings her mother’s ashes there and she sees the legendary will-o’-the-wisp. Jazz thinks this is all foolishness but has been helping Olivia all her life. Olivia’s synesthesia (a neurological condition in which people can “see” sound and “taste” visual stimuli, etc.) has made her the dreamer, the one who lifted their mother’s mood, the one prone to impulse. When their van breaks down on the way to the Glade, Olivia hops a train, and Jazz furiously follows. There, they are introduced to train culture, and Olivia meets Hobbs, a 20-year-old train hopper with a face covered in tattoos. He agrees to bring Olivia to the Cranberry Glades, but Jazz has other plans. Though Walsh creates a vivid journey for the two sisters, they both speak and act, as does Hobbs, far older than their years, resulting in a less-than-believable coming-of-age tale.
An uneven mix of magic and sorrow, from a promising writer.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-46160-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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