Her mother is right: one wishes this endearing stylist, reminiscent of Elizabeth Gilbert, would have done it the easy way. A...
In a series of autobiographically inspired vignettes, a novelist reimagines her mother’s life and revisits her own.
Most chapters of Crane’s fifth book (When The Messenger Is Hot, 2012, etc.) include sidebars in which narrator Betsy Crane (the author’s name) and her mom, opera singer Lois Crane (also real), debate the finer points of the project they have undertaken: telling the story of each other’s lives as best they can. “I think we should have more scenes together,” says Lois. “I’ve written some short stories about us before. I also might write a memoir someday. I didn’t want to overlap too much,” counters Betsy. “Some people might think this is a memoir,” her mother points out. While it’s definitely a novel, since both the real Lois Crane and the mother in the book are dead, the story bears a complicated relationship to nonfictional truth. Sometimes the two narrators seem to adhere closely to the facts, as in the first chapter, “Binghamton, 1961,” in which Lois tells the story of her daughter’s birth. Sometimes there are embellishments, filling in the blanks of the things mothers and daughter don’t know about each other, as in “To New Friends,” where Lois tells the story of how Betsy lost her virginity, or “The Rest of Your Life,” where Lois tells how Betsy got sober in AA, or several chapters called “Lois Dies,” where Lois tries to imagine her daughter’s life after she disappears from it. Sometimes the stories contain significant fantasy elements, as in “Betsy’s Wedding #2,” in which Betsy imagines Lois returned from the dead as one of the guests at a wedding she did not live to see, causing bitterness among the guests whose dead parents did not similarly reincarnate. In a section called “In Which We Go To Parsons Because It’s Not A Memoir,” the two are sisters, trying unsuccessfully to become clothing designers. In the commentary for this chapter, her mother says, “I don’t understand, why, Betsy, if you’re making all this up, it all has to be so hard.”
Her mother is right: one wishes this endearing stylist, reminiscent of Elizabeth Gilbert, would have done it the easy way. A memoir would have been just fine.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241267-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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