Literature as sociology, or sociology as literature; either way, a sometimes-dispiriting but eloquent evocation of lives at...
Carver-esque, West Coast–set tales of working-class hardship from Roe, author of the well-received novel The Miracle Girl (2015).
Roe’s short stories, in the main, are vignettes of a life not many people would willingly choose: “All in all, then, not exactly a glossy Kodak moment suitable for framing, I admit,” as the protagonist of the lead story puts it. Roe's world is a haze of schnapps bottles, home pregnancy kits, and Indian casinos, all recipes for disaster—and yet, because they are fundamentally decent if fundamentally flawed, Roe’s characters pull through: “we’ll just have to live as best we can, and wait,” the protagonist concludes, having also let us know of a curious twist. In other stories, set in bars and run-down apartments, the characters live as well as they can, enduring abortions and poverty and life in cities like San Diego and San Francisco that abound in beauty and pleasures just beyond reach. Roe writes assuredly, without condescension or sentimentality, of people for whom going to a fast-food restaurant is a carefully budgeted treat, one that too often “loses something between the wanting and the having.” One perfectly constructed story begins and ends with dashed dreams: “Later they would divorce and there would be much bitterness,” opens “Mexico,” closing a few pages later with the Hemingway-esque note that the story had been, after all, about “two people who loved each other but just not enough.” Indeed, not enough because they are too tired, too disappointed. Only a few moments leave this gritty, exurban world, and when they do they often take us into other places that not many people know about, like the lairs of the hash-smoking morel pickers of the southern Oregon coast; even then, though, it’s all a shroud of marine layer and moral—and morphine—haze.
Literature as sociology, or sociology as literature; either way, a sometimes-dispiriting but eloquent evocation of lives at the continent’s edge.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-938126-43-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Engine Books
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
