A novel that asks whether a woman can "have it all" but that never even approaches an answer.
A Silicon Valley executive campaigns to be Pennsylvania’s first female senator while trying to hold her marriage together in Piazza's (co-author: Fitness Junkie, 2017, etc.) latest novel, set in a post-2016 political climate.
Charlotte Walsh, COO of one of the fastest-growing companies in the world, is running for senator in Pennsylvania. She's moved her family of five to the town where she and her husband grew up, Elk Hollow, where the struggling working-class economy is a world away from the luxury of their West Coast lives. Class becomes an issue. “Don’t say the word sabbatical,” her blunt, single-minded campaign manager interrupts her at their first meeting. “You sound elitist.” But gender becomes, predictably, the true crux of the campaign. A collapse sparks pregnancy rumors, Charlotte’s shoe choice becomes a major headline, and an offensive, sexist comment from a rival is accidentally spoken into a microphone. All of this plays out the way it would—and has—played out today. We see glimpses of what the public thinks of Charlotte through several fragments of “real” texts: an EMILY’s List endorsement, an MSNBC interview transcript, and several think pieces and Twitter threads. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article explains helpfully that Pennsylvania has never elected a female governor or U.S. senator. Mostly, however, these texts are asides and attempts at verisimilitude that add no depth to the fast-paced plot. As Election Day nears, marked in a countdown at the beginning of each chapter, Charlotte’s marriage frays. Secrets are hinted at but not fully revealed to the reader until quite late. By then, they can only disappoint. There are, however, a few scenes and figures that resonate. Notably, Charlotte’s mentor, a retired female senator, has a complex and nuanced story arc. But mostly the tone is just short of satire and takes aim at everything.
A novel that asks whether a woman can "have it all" but that never even approaches an answer.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7941-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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