Uneven and very slow to gather momentum but worth the effort for admirers of serious literary fiction.
First-time novelist Winslow follows the intertwined (mis)fortunes of several families across a century in a small Maine town.
The opening episode, in February 1977, limns the harsh natural world that has shaped the hard inhabitants of Wellbridge, Maine. It’s been one year since Edith Baine’s husband and eldest son drowned in a storm while collecting lobster traps, and throughout the novel nature is an adversary, “from the dry-bone crack of winter [to] the purgatory of mud season.” As Winslow’s dour tale winds back to 1904 and then rolls forward to 2017, we meet generations of unhappy folks mired in bad marriages, alcohol, and class resentments. Some try to distance themselves from their relatives by ostentatiously embracing the more judgmental denominations of Protestantism. Others, like Edith, disdain the highfalutin ways of outsiders like her French daughter-in-law, who dares to bring a salad of cold string beans and pickled beets to dinner. This relentless litany of disappointment and disapproval wears thin over six bleak chapters, but the narrative slowly gets more textured, beginning with a blackly comic 1992 funeral, following which anxious Victoria Moody is unable to prevent her fiance from joining the drunken efforts of her no-count kin as they try to dig up her father to put a rabbit’s foot in his coffin. The dead man narrates a brief portion of this chapter, and from that point on several ghosts and another dead protagonist appear; they deepen the novel with suggestions that people are more than the sum of their actions and final judgment should wait on full understanding. In the lovely, melancholy closing chapter, Edith’s granddaughter comes back to her hometown because “there’s nowhere to be but here,” and she resumes work on a long-abandoned painting of the old Baines farmhouse, “collapsing in on itself with the weight of all that surrounds it and all that has gone before.”
Uneven and very slow to gather momentum but worth the effort for admirers of serious literary fiction.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-77648-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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