As Collie says while Uncle Tom is telling one of his endless stories, “Here it comes—death by anecdote.”
Dave Eggers fans should enjoy Canadian journalist Kelly’s rambunctious first novel about the guilt-ridden scion of a super-rich, eccentric Martha’s Vineyard family.
Collie Flanagan is the angst-ridden narrator of his family’s history. Mom is Anais Flanagan, an eccentric, perhaps insane Marxist who despises her father Peregrine “The Falcon” Lowell, a WASP publishing baron. Dad is womanizing, alcoholic Charlie Flanagan. Rounding out the ramshackle household is Charlie’s pigeon-raising brother Uncle Tom. Collie takes his mother’s hatred in stride. She never lets him forget that his birth was the worst day of her life on two counts: his arrival on the same day Kennedy was shot, and his masculine sex. Collie’s younger brother Bingo, meanwhile, is a beautiful feckless charmer, and Anais adores him. Early on Collie casually announces that Bingo died twice by the age of 19, setting up the reader’s apprehension as Collie delivers a barrage of anecdotes showing the various nutty/drunken/wacky/irresponsible aspects of the Flanagan clan. There are the dogs everywhere, Mom’s fixation with Rupert Brooke, the brawls, the meals of nothing but ice cream. After surviving an asthma attack as a child, Bingo becomes something of a terror, a prankster kicked out of multiple schools, but he’s still his parents’ delight while stolid Collie, a star at Andover and then Brown, becomes his austere grandfather’s pet project. Collie gives painful examples of his lack of grit in contrast to wild misbehaving Bingo’s personal courage. Then halfway through the novel comes the caving accident. Bingo drowns. Recognizing he couldn’t have saved him, Collie, now 19, nevertheless blames himself. So does Anais, who slugs Collie hard enough to break his jaw before dropping dead in maternal grief. The novel becomes a story of Collie’s redemption. Through a series of reinventions—student to playboy to idealist (taken captive in war-torn El Salvador) to doctor to pigeon racer—he learns the meaning of courage.
As Collie says while Uncle Tom is telling one of his endless stories, “Here it comes—death by anecdote.”Pub Date: March 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-40614-7
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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