A lovely family portrait: elegiac yet contemporary, formal yet intimate.
This multigenerational story of a privileged family’s vacations on Massachusetts’ Buzzards Bay is as much about the place as the people.
In 1942, wheelchair-bound insurance executive Mr. Porter (shades of FDR), his stoic wife, three daughters—beloved oldest son Charlie is off training to be a pilot—and gardening expert mother, along with assorted staff, are one of the few families summering at Ashaunt Point, where an Army base has been temporarily set up nearby. Graver (Awake, 2004, etc.) introduces the family members, particularly the bright, slightly rebellious 16-year-old Helen, in sharp, nuanced sketches while focusing on Bea, the family’s Scottish nursemaid, who is devoted to youngest daughter, Jane. After the first true romance of her life, 34-year-old Bea turns down a soldier’s marriage proposal in order to remain with the Porters. By 1947, Helen takes the story’s center stage. Studying abroad, newly in love with ideas and a man, she writes reflective but girlishly innocent letters home. By the ’60s, when Hurricane Donna hits Ashaunt, all three sisters have married. While Jane seems conventionally happy and middle sister Dossy suffers from bouts of clinical depression, Helen is still trying to find her way. Pregnant with her fourth child while enrolled in graduate school, she feels torn between love of family and growing intellectual ambitions. A decade later, Helen’s troubled oldest son, Charlie, named after the uncle who was killed in World War II and always Helen’s favorite, moves into a cabin on the peninsula, which he finds threatened by encroaching development. Helen and Charlie’s difficult but enduring mother-son relationship is particularly moving, but every character is given his/her emotional due. As one generation passes to the next, Ashaunt Point remains the gently wild refuge where the Porters can most be themselves.
A lovely family portrait: elegiac yet contemporary, formal yet intimate.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-218484-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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