An ungainly, overlong merger of an adventure tale and social critique.
A troubled dentist pulls up stakes and moves herself and her two children to Alaska.
Josie, like the heroes of prior Eggers novels A Hologram for the King (2012) and The Circle (2013), is an archetypal figure, representative of how modern living corrodes our psyches. Josie has split from the slacker father of her two children, Ana and Paul; she’s tormented by having encouraged a patient to sign up for the Marines who is then killed in action; and a malpractice suit effectively annihilates her practice. The only thing to be done, apparently, is to buy an RV and head from Ohio to southern Alaska, where her “stepsister who was not quite a stepsister” lives. Every romantic notion about heading for the hills is wrecked in short order: the RV is slow and hard to manage, let alone park; every beautiful vista abuts a tourist trap where staples are wildly overpriced; and Josie’s stepsister has a cultic relationship with the locals that forbids sticking around. (And that “not a quite a stepsister” situation, once it’s explained, is understandably awkward.) Between the novel's title, its episodic structure, and the scenes of rain and wildfire that shape the book’s second half, it’s clear Eggers means to craft a contemporary epic in which the bad guy is our lack of connection with nature. (Josie’s stepsister lives in Homer.) Josie herself is an intermittently poignant and affecting figure, prone to comic musings about writing a musical about her hapless experiences or dourly fixating on a daymare of a bottle breaking across her face. But those details can’t compensate for the overall baggy and rambling nature of the story, which doesn’t meaningfully develop Josie’s character and mainly reduces her children into plot complications. “We are not civilized people,” Josie muses. But this novel is an unpersuasive glimpse into our nascent ferality.
An ungainly, overlong merger of an adventure tale and social critique.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49380-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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