A run-of-the-mill mother-daughter story.
A mother and daughter take a coast-to-coast journey and get caught in the economic downturn.
Thirteen-year-old Ruthie’s entire life has been a parade of shoddy homes and questionable men as her mother moves from relationship to relationship. The pattern’s pretty much the same: When Rita tires of one man, she and Ruthie clear the house of any items they can sell and move on to the next. Rita is unapologetic about her lifestyle, but she’s protective of 13-year-old Ruthie, a remarkably bright and precocious girl who rarely misses a day of school despite their vagabond existence. When Ruthie suggests it’s once again time to move on, they pile their belongings into their usual luggage—plastic garbage bags—and climb into Rita’s dilapidated Ford Escort for a cross-country trip from California to Boston. But their car breaks down short of their destination, and with only a few dollars remaining, Rita finds work at a diner in Fat River, New York, a one-horse town with a stagnant economy. The longer they stay, the more Ruthie and Rita feel part of the community. Mel, the diner owner, is the first man to look at Rita with respect. Transgender waitress Peter Pam becomes Ruthie’s closest friend and confidante, and the elderly hardware-store owners make sure her recycled bicycle remains in top-notch shape. Then Rita buys a home she can't really afford, and Ruthie’s tenuous hold on normalcy shifts as the economy takes a nose dive. Weatherwax presents a finely drawn central character whose first-person voice drives an acceptable plot, but her imagination flags in other aspects of this debut novel. Characters in Fat River are superficially drawn, and sometimes even Ruthie seems too detached from the story she tells.
A run-of-the-mill mother-daughter story.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5520-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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