A domestic fable about grief and redemption likely to leave readers emotionally threadbare.
The life of a young albino boy in suburban New Jersey is permanently marked by two tragedies, neither of his making.
Playwright and novelist Lodato’s debut novel (Mathilda Savitch, 2009) was a sublime coming-of-age story about a young girl. In his ambitious but less focused follow-up, the author switches genders to focus on the life-changing events that shape an 8-year-old boy. It’s a dark mirror of Lodato’s debut, filled with menace and grief that takes no less than seven weighty passages to play out. The child is Edgar Allan Fini, who has “pale skin, white hair, tired eyes a sea-glass shade of green.” To his mother, Lucy, an alcoholic hair stylist, he's “her funny little albino fruitcake.” But as Lodato starts building out Lucy and Edgar’s world with meticulous detail, he’s also lacing the tale with ill intent. First there is the matter of Frank Fini, Edgar’s manic-depressive father, who committed suicide by plunging his car off a cliff, nearly taking Lucy with him. There's Edgar’s grandmother Florence, who wields such influence over the boy that she continues to muse over his fate even after her death. We have the butcher with whom Lucy is sleeping, who accidentally severs Edgar’s finger. Lucy herself is still shattered by Frank’s death, to the degree that she tells her lover “please don’t be happy” when she finds herself pregnant. It’s a dark tale told in stolen moments and silent reflections, and it gets darker as time passes. The final half of the book depicts the strange relationship between Edgar and a man named Conrad who committed a terrible trespass against his own son. These characters hurtle toward a climax that begins to defy plausibility—the author ties things up with a jarring change in voice at the end—but readers who make it that far are apt to be enraptured already.
A domestic fable about grief and redemption likely to leave readers emotionally threadbare.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-09698-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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