Ahern has a way with character, but her penchant for the supernatural—angels, ghosts, déjà vu—works against the weight of...
Light holiday fare with a Lesson from Irish bestseller Ahern (Thanks for the Memories, 2009, etc.).
The author’s variation on A Christmas Carol isn’t subtle. Ahern encourages readers to appreciate the important things (tradition, home, family, etc.). Wealthy executive Lou Suffern neglects his children and cheats on his wife; his only friend is his all-consuming ambition. But Lou’s not entirely bad. On a cold December morning, he buys a coffee for the young homeless man in front of his Dublin office building. They strike up a conversation, and Gabe (short for Gabriel—get it?) reveals that Lou’s boss is having secret lunches with Lou’s rival. Thinking it might be handy to have someone with Gabe’s powers of observation on hand, Lou gets him a job in the mailroom. As the novel unfolds, two things become clear: Lou is so busy that he needs to be in two places at once, and Gabe is able to magically be in two places at once. This leads Gabe, who’s friendly in a sanctimonious, might-be-an-angel kind of way, to give Lou magic pills. Take one, and just for the night he can clone himself, close two business deals at the same time, then go out to celebrate while also heading home to tend to his sick wife and daughter. The cloning helps Lou see the error of his ways. His family really does need him, he realizes, and he really does love them. More epiphanies occur until Lou finally gets it: Life is short, and real estate can’t hug you back.
Ahern has a way with character, but her penchant for the supernatural—angels, ghosts, déjà vu—works against the weight of her story.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-170626-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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