A poignant and warmly humorous tale of emotional survival.
A soldier’s refusal to go out on a raid sets in motion the collapse—and metamorphosis—of his entire family.
Not that his family is built upon a sturdy foundation that could weather the storms of news reporters camped outside their home for months on end or the Internet trolls slinging mud on their name. No. The Stellkellner family is built on silences, unspoken rules, broken emotions. So when Joseph returns from deployment in Baghdad after only three and a half months and the media quickly seizes on the story, his younger brother and sister are left in the dark. In fact, no one bothers to ask Joseph why he balked. Parents Brad and Janet forbid Joseph from speaking to Aubrey and Ruth, and though he’d like to disobey that injunction, events soon have him on the run and just as quickly incarcerated in a federal prison awaiting court-martial. So 13-year-old Aubrey and 15-year old Ruth must sort out what happened for themselves, cobbling together clues dropped by teachers, bullies, and reporters. Hyde (Worthy, 2015, etc.), the bestselling author of Pay It Forward, deftly and compassionately crafts Ruth’s and Aubrey’s bewildered interior monologues, tracing alternately Ruth’s sympathetic and Aubrey’s traumatized reactions. Aubrey’s outbursts at school eventually land him in the office of Luanne, a brilliant therapist whose fish enchant him. Ruth loses her boyfriend, Brad loses his job, and the tenuous fibers holding the Stellkellners together fray even further. That is, until Aubrey and Ruth track down the delightful Hamish, a man Joseph considered a father figure. Gifted with a disarming ability to connect quickly and deeply with anyone—even complete strangers intending to fling themselves off the cliff outside his home—Ham begins to heal not only Ruth, but the entire family.
A poignant and warmly humorous tale of emotional survival.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5089-4
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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