The confessions of a teenage struggler who just needs some time to figure it all out.
An orphan has an eventful week when he’s suspended from school.
This new book by Carr (Sip, 2017, etc.) is painful to read but wonderfully crafted and artfully poignant in its reflection of our times. The narrator is 17-year-old Riggle Quick, the Holden Caulfield of a rural Indiana in the depths of the opioid crisis and the racism empowered by the president of the United States. First, Riggle gets suspended because some jerk in his high school turns in a THC vaporizer, claiming it’s his. He spends the rest of his week of suspension exploring the peculiar world he’s trapped in, having been sent there from Texas after his parents died. He sees Black Panther with his best friend, Bennet, but first has to shave Bennet’s head because he’s biracial and is just light enough to pass without his Afro, so he won't get hassled by the cops for cutting school. We learn Riggle’s dad was a truck driver who died in a crash, and while it’s not called out, it looks like mom OD’ed. Riggle has the hots for his aunt (by marriage) Peggy, but he’s also been charged with finding his Uncle Joe, a junkie who’s gone missing. Riggle’s poignant, candid narration is punctuated by that of Remote, a shadow-puppet bird invented by his mother who tells Riggle fables about how each day of his lousy week was named. The most delightful sections come when Riggle, who doesn’t know what the hell he wants to do with his life, barges into a restaurant called Broth and convinces the caustic chef to take him on as a dishwasher. There’s also serious, painful stuff here: “Sometimes you feel so terrible that all you know is that you need something, and when people feel that way, they go out looking,” says Riggle. Finally, Carr slips in a great word here that Riggle borrows from a Latina friend in Texas who asked him the first day, “You a smuggler or a struggler?”
The confessions of a teenage struggler who just needs some time to figure it all out.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64129-078-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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
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