Plenty of interesting material that this talented author should have developed more fully.
A Rona Jaffe–esque office drama mingles with an environmental morality tale à la Barbara Kingsolver in Scott’s latest (De Potter’s Grand Tour, 2014, etc.).
The Port of New York Authority's Office of Public Relations, where Mrs. Lee K. Jaffe supervises 11 “clerical girls” more interested in husbands than careers, recalls The Best of Everything, though its melodramatic complications are confined to one employee: unwed mother Pauline Moreau, rescued from prostitution and brought to the Port Authority by Mrs. J in 1964. The odyssey of Bob Whittaker, Pauline’s former boss—and her baby’s father—moves the novel into Animal Dreams territory; he runs an aluminum plant in upstate New York that is poisoning the land, animals, and people around it with toxic waste. The connection between the two plot strands is the World Trade Center, clad in aluminum from Whittaker’s plant, and Mrs. J’s pet project: “She loved, loved, loved a job that allowed her to spend her time turning dreams into reality!” It’s blatantly ironic that Mrs. J, proud of a father who quit his job as a coal mine supervisor rather than cover up unsafe conditions, prides herself on work that involves sugarcoating the Port Authority’s displacement of disgruntled locals. Whittaker’s moral blind spots prove a lot more deadly, as the narrative ricochets around a half-century and yokes together a plethora of disparate elements. A catastrophic fire at the aluminum plant in 1988 brings closure to several storylines yet seems tonally at odds with the haunting final scene among the ghosts of 9/11 victims. The large cast of characters is sharply drawn, but no one gets enough sustained attention to command our emotional engagement; a number of collective scenes voiced by people we never meet again, from aluminum plant workers to World Trade Center protestors, reinforces the sense that this book needed to be longer to work out its potential.
Plenty of interesting material that this talented author should have developed more fully.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-36383-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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