Engagingly cleareyed prose about a winningly eccentric heroine in love with trees and literature.
In Kane’s (This Close, 2013, etc.) contemplative second novel, a woman uses an unexpected gift of time to visit four long-neglected friends.
Despite the wire hanger of a plot surrounding these visits, the novel turns on narrator May’s ruminations. Her love of cats and trees (beautiful arboreal drawings by Edward Carey punctuate the text), not to mention her suitcase named Grendel, suggests a delicate, even twee sensibility, but May is capable of expressing curmudgeonly tart opinions about everything from home renovation to the value of neighbors to social media’s evils. Approaching 40, she lives quietly with her aged father in her hometown, working as a gardener at the local university and pondering how best to use 30 days of paid leave the school has awarded her. Inspired by readings on friendship, a skill she’d like to improve, and using The Odyssey as a reverse model of epic adventuring—“What if Penelope had left?” she asks herself—May sets off to visit her long-distance friends. All are surprised by May’s visits but pleased to see her. In return, May follows Emily Post and Greek travel etiquette to become a perfect guest, although she tends to hover at the brink of actual intimacy. Her cautious affection blends with sly humor in her observations of each hostess: the suburban homemaker cracking under the pressure of creating internet-worthy domestic perfection; the Seattle ultraprogressive in the middle of a divorce; the Manhattan sophisticate stressed by her new roles as second wife and stepmother; and the landscape architect leading an invitingly cozy single life in London. May is generous in sharing her thoughts, but the reader must search between the lines to read her heart as May begins receiving postcards hinting at a desire for more than friendship from a nice man back home. More apparent is May’s emotional struggle with unresolved grief over her mother’s lingering illness and death years earlier.
Engagingly cleareyed prose about a winningly eccentric heroine in love with trees and literature.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55922-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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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