A tale of an immigrant family rendered with unusual care, though it strains too hard for depth at times.
A Greek immigrant in his sunset years takes out a lifetime’s worth of frustrations on his three daughters in this seriocomic debut.
By most measures, Stavros has had a good life in America, successfully launching two New Jersey restaurants and raising three daughters. But the novel opens with an email venting his frustrations with those around him: daughter Stavroula for not adhering to “normal society” (read: she has a girlfriend); daughter Litza for picking up the addictions that consumed his first wife; second wife Carol for, he claims, pitting the two daughters against him. But Stavros is a frustration himself: the “let me explain you” that opens his email tirade signals both his poor grammar and his patriarchal attitude. The early sections of the novel mainly circle on his family’s and friends’ reactions to Stavros’ claim that he will die in 10 days and then on a disappearance that suggests he might do himself in. Liontas carries this story with some carefully tuned humor, recognizing Stavros’ absurdity without allowing him to degrade into a wacky-immigrant cliché. That’s bolstered by the history of Stavros’ upbringing in Crete and his hardscrabble early days in the United States, where Stavroula and Litza are effectively neglected by their overworked father and checked-out mother. Even so, the novel feels at once overstuffed and undercooked, brimming with characters Liontas doesn’t always seem sure what to do with; Stavros’ girlfriend, second wife, and third daughter are unfinished characters, and Litza’s habit of contemplating people via the ailment codes she uses at her job at an insurance company feels more like a writerly gimmick than characterization. Liontas handles Stavros’ final fate gracefully, if a touch abstractly, recognizing the pull that even the most exasperating loved ones have on us in a family.
A tale of an immigrant family rendered with unusual care, though it strains too hard for depth at times.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8908-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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