A serious, nuanced portrait of a family of creative people as their decisions, large and small, play out in their lives.
When her long-estranged ex-husband—a still-handsome German avant-garde musician—comes back into her life, things get complicated for Louise.
Louise, a 59-year-old visual artist in Eugene, Oregon, has two daughters, one from each of her marriages. Elke was born when Louise was an art student in Dusseldorf in the early 1970s. Not long after the birth, Louise's mother fell ill, so she took the baby and went home. Since things were going badly at the time with her new husband, Dieter, Louise ended up staying in the U.S. By the time Dieter showed up for a visit, she was dating Richard, a professor of urban design, and a messy period with both men on the scene ensued. But that was ages ago. She married Richard and had another daughter, Margot; Dieter ended up immigrating to New York. One day she gets a call from Elke, now 35, asking her to return to Germany to attend the funeral of her grandmother, Louise's ex-mother-in-law, with whom she was once close. Her other daughter happens to be in Europe at this time as well, touring with her experimental band, Sky Mall. Impulsively, Louise decides to go—leaving a jealous Richard stewing at home with a list of chores involving Louise's long-term conceptual art project. The novel moves between Dusseldorf and Eugene, between the early 1970s and 2008, with richly textured depictions of these times and places. Louise's student years were the era of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the disastrous '72 Olympics in Germany; the Grateful Dead and Nixon's resignation in the U.S.; and changing sexual mores in both cultures that led to difficult situations like the one she is still dealing with 35 years later. Another important theme is the burden of World War II on the German spirit, further complicated in Dieter's family by secrets and lies. Diehl's debut confidently handles these cultural and historical complexities and is equally fluent in depicting the concerns and processes of visual artists and musicians.
A serious, nuanced portrait of a family of creative people as their decisions, large and small, play out in their lives.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-48372-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
