A compelling tale of damage and the healing powers of acceptance.
In the summer of 1969, 14-year-old Lucas Painter takes up running in the woods behind his house and ends up saving three lives, one of them his own.
It all begins when two enormous dogs start chasing him one afternoon, and Lucas is delighted to discover that Rembrandt and Vermeer, two Weimaraner–Great Dane mixes, are out to play rather than attack. Running with them is a great way to escape the tension in his own home, where his parents do nothing but argue while his big brother, Roy, has been drafted to fight in Vietnam. But one morning the dogs won’t budge from the porch, and Lucas discovers that their owner, the mysterious Zoe Dinsmore, has tried to take her own life. By fetching help, Lucas saves Zoe’s life, and in the months that follow, Zoe saves Lucas’ life, too. Ostracized by the town for an accident years earlier, Zoe keeps to herself. But as Lucas shows up every day, the two slowly forge a profound friendship. Meanwhile, Lucas’ best friend, Connor, is struggling with his own demons. Rather than helplessly watch Connor slip deeper into depression, Lucas introduces him to Zoe, whose ability to listen without judgment becomes a lifeline. So when Roy returns, wounded and troubled, it’s only natural that Lucas and Zoe find a way to help him, too. A master of tales shaped for the human heart, Hyde (Have You Seen Luis Velez?, 2019, etc.) deftly balances tears against courage, avoiding trite sentimentality. Lucas and Connor both come from troubled homes, but the troubles ring true, never gratuitously abusive; and Hyde never plays Zoe’s and Roy’s tribulations for melodramatic effect.
A compelling tale of damage and the healing powers of acceptance.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4240-6
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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