Strangely compelling through the middle pages, but Adler’s prose is as threadbare as ever.
Adler returns with a sequel to The War of the Roses (1981), offering another generation of nasty stick figures in foreseeable sentences.
It may or may not be a good thing that the action here never gets quite as excruciating as in its predecessor, where divorcing parents battled literally to the death for possession of their stunningly restored house on DC’s Embassy Row. Years later, young Josh Rose, son of the deceased Jonathan and Barbara, marries aggressive ex-lawyer Victoria, the toweringly dysfunctional child of a bitter mother who drove her husband into abandoning them and whose attitude toward men is “Never near when you need them, are they?” Josh and Victoria teach offspring Michael and Emily not to lie, but when Michael is accused repeatedly of stealing Milky Ways from hysterical and lisping fellow student Madeline, can they believe his denials? Victoria’s ire rises stormlike over the child’s private school. Adler sets us up for what bodes to be a Victoria-and-Josh repeat of Jonathan and Barbara’s mortal match, but it doesn’t work out that way. Josh, creative director at an ad agency, finds himself seduced by Angela Bocci, a brilliant Italian artist with two kids and a husband. He can’t bear the strain and breaks up with her after six months, but Angela’s thuggish spouse Dominic decides to blackmail him for $500,000. When Victoria hears about this, she takes Dominic to pieces. Meanwhile, Gordon Tatum, head of Michael’s school, promises to expel the boy unless Victoria blows him. Josh and Victoria head toward divorce, but the kids will have final say about that. And, of course, Josh must discover Victoria’s deed with Tatum.
Strangely compelling through the middle pages, but Adler’s prose is as threadbare as ever.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4022-0197-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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