A fascinating and frequently moving novel of family and geology.
In Green’s debut novel, a geologist seeks fulfillment at a dam site in Turkey.
In Turkey, 1973, American geologist Will Ross has come to the remote village of Kayakale, where a vast dam is being built to harness the hydroelectric power of the mighty Euphrates. As the project’s chief foundation geologist, Will must “read the story in the rocks” beneath the dam—a story that, so far, has been giving the engineers nightmares. Will planned to come alone, but a last-minute complication (involving his ex-wife’s alcoholism) requires Will to bring his three children—15-year-old Kevin, 12-year-old Rob, and 4-year-old Didi—along with him for the remainder of the project. The children are not happy to have their lives uprooted from suburban New Jersey and dropped into a compound in the middle of the Turkish wilderness. The lone bright spot is the presence of Paula, a peppy young teacher from West Virginia who offers Will and the kids some kindness as they acclimate to their new surroundings. The whole project is put on pause until Will can figure out the cause of the mysterious voids that exist in the rock beneath the site, threatening the dam’s stability. The problem turns out to be larger and stranger than Will anticipated, and it may require more than mere scientific know-how to fix, even as his family’s situation teeters as precariously as the ground beneath his feet. Green’s prose is tender and keenly observant: “They ambled up to the base of a tower of tuff where ocher striations crisscrossed pure white rock, as if a painter had stroked a brush across it. The light moved over it as the sun rose, making the lines dance on the rock’s surface.” In the wonders of subterranean rock formations, Green finds an apt metaphor for Will’s unplumbed psyche, painting a portrait of a man desperate to keep his life from being crushed beneath the pressure of life’s obligations.
A fascinating and frequently moving novel of family and geology.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781647426163
Page Count: 320
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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