Adheres scrupulously to the motto “first, do no harm.”
The latest of Taylor’s Irish Country Doctor series, this time a prequel depicting protagonist Fingal O’Reilly’s med-student days.
The extended flashback which takes up most of the book begins when Fingal, on his way home to Ballybucklebo, the Ulster village where he is a family doctor, stops at the scene of an accident: Donal Donnelly, Ballybucklebo’s lovable ne’er-do-well, has crashed his motor bike and suffered head trauma. While monitoring Donal’s condition at a nearby hospital, Fingal recalls his clinical training at Trinity College, serving indigent patients from Dublin’s slums. Fingal’s literature professor father was so opposed to Fingal’s chosen career that he refused to bankroll his son’s education, forcing Fingal to spend four years in the merchant marine to earn the tuition. His long-suffering mother, who’d dreamed of being a physician herself, encourages Fingal and eventually his father comes around. At school, Fingal weathers a series of scrapes in between pints of Guinness at the local pub with his three best friends. He ponders getting engaged to Kitty, a student nurse, but failing an exam is enough to convince him that he needs to forego romance for studying. Fingal raises some hackles because he sees his patients as people, not cases: he mourns when his first cardiac patient cannot be saved, and finds a job for an impoverished veteran whom he treated for pneumonia. When his father is diagnosed with leukemia, Fingal wonders if he will live long enough to see his son graduate. Although it will appeal to faithful followers of the series, this book suffers from a plodding pace and a lack of suspense. (There’s never any real question about whether Fingal will earn his degree, or whether he and Kitty will wind up together.) As with other volumes, the principal appeal is in the dialects, local color and, for fans of medical fiction, the detailed descriptions of diagnoses and treatment regimens, both present-day and pre–World War II.
Adheres scrupulously to the motto “first, do no harm.”Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2673-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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