A slight novel with great—and eventually moving—insights into the dynamics of family life.
A family reunion of sorts, in which four siblings re-gather, reminisce and then once again split apart.
We first meet the narrator, Garance, when she’s on the way to a family wedding, one she doesn’t particularly care to attend, with her brother Simon and his insufferable wife Carine. Simon is calm and quietly dignified and doesn’t seem to deserve his wife’s quirkiness—her fear of germs, for example, or her refusal to wear a seatbelt because it gives her claustrophobia. (We later find out from Simon that Carine is quite different—and much more sympathetic—when Simon’s siblings aren’t around; that she’s in fact jealous of the closeness Simon shares with his sisters.) On the way to the wedding—and much to Carine’s annoyance—they stop to pick up older sister Lola, an artist whose marriage has fallen apart. Just before the wedding, Garance, Simon and Lola spontaneously take off to visit their younger brother Vincent at “his” chateau—not a family estate but rather the place where he lives as a caretaker and visitors’ guide. They arrive just in time to find Vincent making up stories about the chateau’s supposedly haunted past, fantasies he crafts out of a vivid imagination that are eaten up by the visiting “hicks.” For one languorous and nostalgic day, the siblings talk, swim, listen to music and reminisce about their past. It’s clear they miss the closeness they once had, and even semi-cynical Garance recognizes the importance of this “borrowed time, an interlude, a moment of grace” that the four of them briefly share.
A slight novel with great—and eventually moving—insights into the dynamics of family life.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60945-005-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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