Lowry’s novel offers humor, sharp social commentary, startling twists, and a satisfying conclusion.
In Lowry’s novel, a repressed politician’s wife finds unexpected strength in the story of her long-lost great-great-aunt.
When Rachel Jackson’s mother passes on to her an heirloom—a small blue trunk that belonged to her “crazy” great-great aunt Marit, who was never spoken of by her family—going through the old papers within it to learn more about Marit seems like a pleasant distraction. Why do the contents include a napkin from a notorious speakeasy, a hank of horsehair, and a news clipping about gangsters? Rachel is secretly miserable, despite her privileged life. Her husband Blake, a conservative Arizona congressman, is running for reelection, and she feels stifled playing the part of perfect political wife. Her situation further darkens when she accidentally finds a woman’s scarf—not her own—in Blake’s computer bag while looking for a rubber band. The narrative shifts: Carrying all her worldly possessions in a blue trunk, Marit Sletmo emigrates from Norway to Wisconsin with her older brother Jorgan and sister Ingrid in 1904 as a naive 17-year-old. Jorgan, her legal guardian, plans to marry her off to a self-absorbed, rich older man to fund his own ambitions. When her budding friendship with an unconventional older woman causes her fiance to break their engagement, Jorgan has her declared insane (and in a time when almost anything could be diagnosed as “hysteria,” that’s appallingly easy to do). He fears that Marit might reveal a damaging secret about him. (“We have decided you should go away…we think it’s the best thing for you.”) The perspective shifts between Rachel’s first-person point of view and Marit’s close third person, an effective way of highlighting the immediacy of the present and the distance of the past. Both women are compelling, sympathetic, and memorable characters. Their interwoven stories reveal unexpected parallels between their very different lives and personalities as each finds the inner strength needed to break free from captivity—Rachel figuratively and Marit literally. Inspired in part by the life of the author’s own ancestor, Marit’s tale will resonate long after readers finish the book.
Lowry’s novel offers humor, sharp social commentary, startling twists, and a satisfying conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798888244418
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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