Less schematic and more down to earth than her first novel, Diffenbaugh’s latest confirms her gift for creating shrewd,...
Question: What kind of parent leaves her two children home alone while she takes off in pursuit of her own mother, who's heading back to Mexico?
Answer: A parent like Letty Espinosa, the troubled heroine of Diffenbaugh’s (The Language of Flowers, 2011) second novel, who suddenly finds herself flying solo and unready to cope. Love and upbringing, the core themes of Diffenbaugh’s bestselling debut, also drive her tightly constructed new novel, which uses its compelling opening to establish Letty’s fecklessness, her 14-year-old son Alex’s prematurely grown-up sense of responsibility, and 6-year-old daughter Luna’s needs. Without her own parents, who have been doing all the child care up till now but whose return to Mexico turns out to be permanent, single mother Letty is going to have to juggle the children, work, and housekeeping by herself for the first time, and to start with, it doesn’t go well. But Letty’s doubts give way to hope as she switches the children to a better school in San Francisco (admittedly, using a false address) and learns from helpful colleague Rick how to mix cocktails that increase her bartending tips. Letty’s story is paralleled with Alex’s: he’s a clever teenager struggling to avoid his mother’s mistakes while falling for classmate Yesenia and coming to know the father Letty hid from him his whole life. With its hardscrabble setting and undocumented characters, Diffenbaugh’s latest is less overtly romantic than her first; it's strong on social issues but sometimes dragged down by a protagonist whose tendency toward self-criticism can be tiring. The tidy plot and satisfying storytelling are winning, though, and ultimately Diffenbaugh delivers a heartwarming journey that mixes redemption and optimistic insight in equal measure.
Less schematic and more down to earth than her first novel, Diffenbaugh’s latest confirms her gift for creating shrewd, sympathetic charmers.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-553-39231-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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