Siddons is at her usual incisive best at skewering the mores of socially pretentious Southerners, and her prose is limpid...
Summer camps play a pivotal role in the life of a young Atlanta heiress.
Thayer Wentworth has always been a disappointment to her mother, Crystal. Tomboyish, and too much like Crystal’s distrusted mother-in-law, Caroline, known as “Grand,” Thayer yearns for the life of the mind. In this Thayer resembles her father Finch, an educator, who died in an accident en route from a camp on Burnt Mountain. Grand, who refused to grant Crystal (a shopkeeper’s daughter) entree to Atlanta’s aristocratic Buckhead set, clearly favors Thayer over her more frivolous older sister Lily. When Grand moves into Crystal’s house after Finch dies, she grooms Thayer to inherit her father’s rarified legacy. First, there’s a counselorship at Sherwood Forest, an exclusive girls’ camp, where Thayer meets Nick Abrams, counselor at a nearby boys’ camp. The two fall madly in love and vow to marry, however when Nick departs for Europe, Thayer learns she is pregnant. Nick never writes or phones as he promised, and Thayer is tricked by Crystal into having an abortion. After a difficult physical and emotional recovery, Thayer attends Sewanee University at Grand’s urging, and there she meets and weds Celtic mythology professor Aengus. Crystal and Grand are no more thrilled about the Irish Aengus than they were about the Jewish Nick, however Grand is at least supportive. After a shocking betrayal (Crystal tells Aengus that the abortion left Thayer sterile), a permanent mother-daughter rift results. Grand dies, leaving Thayer and Aengus a rustic fieldstone house in a wooded Atlanta suburb. At first life is blissful, but then a local corrupt politician flatters Aengus into propagating Celtic lore at a boys’ camp (which churns out the Atlanta equivalent of Stepford Teens) that's located, ominously enough, on Burnt Mountain. Suddenly Aengus’ seemingly benign Celtic obsession turns into something menacing and Michael Flatley–like.
Siddons is at her usual incisive best at skewering the mores of socially pretentious Southerners, and her prose is limpid and mesmerizing, but the grand gignol denouement beggars belief.Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-52789-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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