An emotionally chilly novel that never delves deeply or complexly enough into any of its individual characters or the...
In MacKenzie’s second novel (City of Strangers, 2009), an American woman living temporarily in São Paulo with her banker husband witnesses Brazil’s increasing political and economic unrest while experiencing personal unrest of her own.
When the novel opens in the relatively recent post–Great Recession era, almost 30-year-old Emma (whose name is withheld from readers for no apparent reason until almost the end of the novel) has been living in São Paulo for six months and considers herself an expat. She narrates her adventures in short snippets of observation, conversation, and memory while showing off her flare for etymology, her one true interest, whenever possible. The relatively brief novel recounts endless rounds of lunches with a group Emma thinks of as "the Wives," chic dinners with her never-named husband, posh parties with his business associates, and hours spent looking out the windows of her apartment in a fortresslike high-rise. Married for five years and without professional ambitions of her own, she has no work to occupy her except tutoring a handful of rich Brazilians—the couple associates only with rich Brazilians—who want to practice their English. But Emma is aware of constant turmoil in the country. One night, leaving a restaurant, she and her husband are held at knife point and robbed by three young boys. Neither Emma nor her husband is hurt, but the robbery haunts her. She visits a poor neighborhood and imagines how hard the lives of her robbers must be. Soon she is volunteering at a refugee center run in a Catholic church while continuing her posh social life. She witnesses growing unrest within the population with a sympathy her husband does not share. The couple argues with increasing intensity over having a baby—he wants children; she resists. Meanwhile she carries on a low-wattage flirtation with her husband’s co-worker Marcos, whose wife, Iara, is her caring friend.
An emotionally chilly novel that never delves deeply or complexly enough into any of its individual characters or the country of Brazil.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-44016-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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