Despite Corporon’s obvious love of Greece, her manipulative storytelling is exasperating.
A stressed-out Greek-American restaurant owner visits her grandmother on a Greek island seemingly untouched by time (or Greece’s economic crisis) in this romantic tribute to her own roots by debut novelist Corporon, a producer of the syndicated TV show Extra.
Tragedy stalks 35-year-old single mother Daphne. Her immigrant parents were murdered in their Yonkers diner, and her husband died at the hands of a drunk driver. She now owns a flourishing high-end restaurant in Manhattan and is engaged to rich banker Stephen, who has reluctantly agreed to hold their wedding on the island of Erikousa, home of Daphne’s beloved Yia-yia, where she's spent countless happy summers. So Daphne arrives on Erikousa with her remarkably well-behaved 5-year-old daughter, Evie, to organize the occasion. Despite her life as an assimilated American, complete with nose job, Daphne soon falls back under the spell of the island’s slow-paced magic. Yia-yia retells the classic Greek myths—which pointedly parallel aspects of Daphne’s life—and reads the future in coffee dregs. Daphne finds herself relaxing and enjoys spending more time with Evie, but she's unsettled by her hostility toward the ruggedly handsome, well-educated fisherman who has befriended Yia-yia since Daphne’s last visit. That hostility melts when he shares the truth about his Jewish family’s connection to Yia-yia, who saved them from the Nazis during World War II. But by now, Stephen has arrived. Poor WASP-y Stephen. Yia-yia voices her disapproval even before she meets him, and readers’ suspicions that his engagement to Daphne is doomed are cemented when he complains that there’s no business center in the local hotel! Except for a mildly refreshing twist at the end, Corporon depends on easy sentiment and a predictable plot that has Daphne reconnecting with her Greek heritage, her faith and the special fate that rules the women of her family.
Despite Corporon’s obvious love of Greece, her manipulative storytelling is exasperating.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-226758-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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