Clevidence’s worldview may be dark, but her future is rosy.
A Depression-era family threatens to disintegrate in this elegant debut.
Three generations live under one roof on Long Island’s Great South Bay. There’s the patriarch, 89-year-old August Scudder; his middle-aged children, Roy and Mavis; and his grandchildren, 19-year-old Nancy and 12-year-old Clayton (their parents are dead). Disasters bookend the novel, which begins in 1937 and pretty much ends a year later. The fireworks-factory explosion at the start kills employees, destroys houses and scares the Scudder household. Nancy, out riding, is thrown from her horse but is unharmed. Another surprise awaits the fearless horsewoman: a chance meeting with a visitor from Boston, a young curator at a natural-history museum. A whirlwind courtship leads to their engagement on his next visit. The family is dismayed. Nancy and Clayton, the orphans, had been inseparable. Now what? Clayton tearfully refuses to go to Boston with his sister. After five years, he feels as rooted in this marshy paradise as his grandfather. Clevidence evokes this presuburban Long Island superbly. She has a painter’s eye and a flair for the striking image. However, she is less assured creating the family. In moving between five viewpoints, she is assembling a jigsaw; though entirely successful with the young siblings, she falters with the older members. Old man Scudder, retired from an early version of the Coastguard, is the linchpin. We’re told of but not shown his authority, and it’s unclear how much his harsh parenting has contributed to the unhappiness of his son Roy, a confirmed bachelor, and that of his equally unhappy daughter Mavis, refugee from a bad marriage, who clings to religion and superstitions. Happiness, we gather, is precarious, even for an exuberant bride like Nancy; death is ubiquitous (a hurricane, the other bookend, will tear the family apart); and God does not exist. That, at least, is Scudder’s conclusion; he lost his faith during a nautical nightmare that will haunt readers as well.
Clevidence’s worldview may be dark, but her future is rosy.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-17314-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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