A delightfully sprawling comedy full of extended families, in all their cocooning warmth and suffocating expectations.
Calla Borelli inherited her love of the theater from her father, Sam, but directing only Shakespeare plays in 1949 might spell the end of her beloved Borelli theater.
Trigiani (All the Stars in the Heavens, 2015, etc.) uses the motifs of the Bard’s plays—orphans, star-crossed lovers, family feuds, and mistaken identities—and the Borelli theater stands at the center of all the action. She has crafted a world of warm, lively characters whose charming idiosyncrasies lead them to collide and ricochet along the way to love. Orphaned at 5, Nicky Castone was lovingly folded into his Aunt Jo and Uncle Dom’s family in South Philly. Now 28 and a WWII veteran, he works in the family cab business, which competes with his Uncle Mike’s business across town, since Dom and Mike have been feuding since 1933. When he’s not squiring Peachy DePino, his fiancee of seven years, he moonlights at the Borelli theater as a prompter and anything else Sam and Calla need. One fateful night, however, two leads of Twelfth Night are called away, leaving Nicky and Calla to take the stage for Sebastian and Olivia’s marriage scene, and chemistry ignites. Of course, Nicky and Calla don’t know they are in love yet. First, the course of love must be strewn with obstacles: Frank, Calla’s boyfriend, who wants to demolish the failing theater; Peachy, who objects to Nicky’s breaking off their engagement; Mr. DePino, who also objects and whose threats of violence inspire Nick to flee town. Nick volunteers to drive a telegram to Roseto, Pennsylvania, but instead of delivering the message, he decides to impersonate Ambassador Carlo Guardinfante of Roseta Valfortore, Italy, a decorated WWII veteran who can no longer attend the Roseto Jubilee given his sudden illness. Chaos ensues.
A delightfully sprawling comedy full of extended families, in all their cocooning warmth and suffocating expectations.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-231922-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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