A lush chronicle of wealth, art, adventure, loneliness, love, and folly told by a narrator you won't be able to forget.
A young girl follows her mother and a wayward group of artists into the Mexican jungle on the eve of World War II in this spare, enchanting novel.
Fourteen-year-old Lara Calaway just wants her mother to notice her. Instead, Leonora, a wealthy New York socialite, is more interested in collecting members of the avant-garde. There's Konrad, a traumatized painter, whom Leonora marries; C., Konrad's longtime lover, a forceful and dedicated writer with hair that "floats around her face like an evil halo"; and the loathed Hetty, "the only other woman with us in Mexico…[who] is just horrible." Maum (Touch, 2017, etc.) depicts Lara's curiosity and longing in exquisite, diary-style vignettes, sketches, notes, and unsent letters. "He'd be so beautiful if he were happy," she muses about Konrad, her new stepfather. "Sometimes at the parties when I catch the way he is with C., I hate my mother for the way she has to have the things that everybody likes." According to Maum, Leonora and Lara Calaway are based loosely on Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen while the artists who make up "the entire bin of loons" at Costalegre are composites of surrealists like André Breton, Leonora Carrington, and Djuna Barnes. Lara makes for a fine narrator—young enough to be both enchanted and annoyed by the strange collection of adults that surround her and old enough to explain her frustrations with heartbreaking clarity. Only occasionally does Maum allow her teenager to really sound like a teenager, and then it's played for laughs. "If she ends up putting her museum here," Lara writes of Costalegre and her mother, "I am going to die." Occasional theatrics aside, Lara blooms when she encounters a Dadaist sculptor from Germany, moved by his work and his ability to really see her, "you know, in that way that feels like something has been thrown directly toward you, as if you're on the other end of a straight line." The novel closes as quickly as it opens, in a moment of teenage confusion, rage, and hope.
A lush chronicle of wealth, art, adventure, loneliness, love, and folly told by a narrator you won't be able to forget.Pub Date: July 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947793-36-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
