A small (too small?) world, but a perceptible talent.
One hasty decision sets in motion decades of consequences for interconnected families in Colorado.
The ice didn’t hold, in 1974, on the night Sammy Henderson took a shortcut home. If it had, he would have kept his promise to 14-year-old Irene, pregnant with his baby—that he would marry her and she would finish school. Instead, Sammy drowned in the frozen river, which forced both Irene and Sammy's sister, Kathleen, to switch tracks and arrange an alternate future for the baby, Melanie. Fox (The Pull of It, 2016, etc.) pushes her story out from this central cluster of events like cracks spreading on a sheet of ice. Using seven voices to narrate their separate but overlapping experiences across the years, from 1974 to 2007, she builds up a vista of linked histories and emotional journeys. Marriages often split up, children are frequently raised by a single parent, and infidelities regularly occur. Grown-up Melanie has a job in Denver and a string of casual, married lovers. One of them, Brian, the son of the policeman who found Sammy’s body, is married to Jenny, who has met Melanie through work. These and other characters—Melanie’s stepfather, Jenny’s mother—add other facets, yet loneliness, departure, and a quest for some kind of fulfillment drive almost all of them. The men are generally more faithless than the women; the value of leaving or being left is debated. One touchstone is the reliably joyful friendship that endures between Kathleen and Irene, which warms and embraces Melanie, too. Fox delivers finely observed, lyrical, detached storytelling, persuasive in its depiction of everyday unions and choices, although her decision to interconnect some characters in a late, jarring encounter seems a coincidence too far. Yet this is eloquent tale-spinning lit by unshowy portraiture.
A small (too small?) world, but a perceptible talent.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-939650-91-7
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Santa Fe Writers Project
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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