Such a cupcake of a book, it feels like you're doing something more self-indulgent than reading.
Ditched by her actor husband, a Manhattan mom takes a job at an Internet startup run by rude club kids with MBAs.
"Did Maya touch my dream catcher?" shrills Rory McGovern's New-Age–y mother-in-law on the last day of their stay at her un–air-conditioned house outside Woodstock. This is the 10th line of the book, and if it makes you laugh, you're all set, because the Nanny Diaries authors, McLaughlin and Kraus (The First Affair, 2013, etc.), are nonstop quippers, making this amiable work of midlife chick-lit quite a hoot. Rory's husband, Blake, an actor whose picture she had on her wall as a teenager and whom she met as an undergrad at SUNY Purchase—"I will die if I don't touch him"—is now, a couple of kids into their married life in New York City, drifting away. Part of the reason for his depression is that he's not getting any work, so Rory, who's a freelance stylist for shelter magazines, has to get a full-time job. She signs on to curate the design vertical (translation: "edit the interior decorating page") at a startup called JeuneBug, which bills itself as the first high-end lifestyle website for children, as in $15,000 acrylic "snowflake beds" and sharkskin wipe dispensers. In an office where "girls of sizes were now wearing things I once would have called panties to answer phones and populate spreadsheets," Rory is tyrannized by her 20-something boss, who shrieks things like, "obviously these should be force-ranked by potential ad rev clicks." Juggling her job, her suddenly single parenting, a bit of corporate intrigue, and a few suitors—the least promising of whom is her nasty boss's 24-year-old boyfriend—Rory forges bravely through this thoroughly modern mess.
Such a cupcake of a book, it feels like you're doing something more self-indulgent than reading.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4345-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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