All in all, an intriguing debut.
The death of a prison lifer reverberates both within and outside the walls in Yaw’s debut novel.
Moses and Jorge both committed murder young, and they’ve been incarcerated for decades in grim Hardenberg Correctional Facility. But amid the brutalities and harsh, hypermasculine codes of prison, these cellmates and friends have carved out a kind of uneasy peace for themselves. Tough-minded, impulsive Moses is entrusted with cellblock mail delivery, and as the novel begins, he's pursuing his intellectual ambitions by taking a course in literature, with help from the civilian employee who supervises the mail. He’s the caged-cat sort of prisoner, smart but profoundly damaged, and he relies on Jorge to keep him calm and in some semblance of control; the older man is his mentor, his mollifier and his spur to continued conscience. Gentle and ever more frail, Jorge tends tamed songbirds in his cell and adores his daughter, Gina, who’s managed to get an Ivy League education and a plum job (avec Emmy) in network news. But his mind is failing, and sometimes now, horrifyingly, he can’t distinguish between Gina and the girl he strangled all those years ago. When, one night, Jorge hangs himself, his death throws Moses into the kind of grief-stricken mental and moral disarray that, in a setting like Hardenberg, has quick, drastic consequences. Meanwhile, outside the walls, we see the way that Jorge’s passing—as well as regret and anguish and separation in all their forms—affects both his daughter and her wealthier, more privileged friends Shell and Ellen. The scenes of prison life—like the harrowing late-novel moment when Moses entertains his first face-to-face visitor in 35 years—are compelling, but the book is more diffuse and less persuasive in the storylines set outside.
All in all, an intriguing debut.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-938126-21-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Engine Books
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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