No one in this world of selfishness, vengefulness, and obsession seems aware what kind of collateral damage their bad...
Proulx’s (Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet, 2008) dark second novel begins during a frigid Canadian winter that sets the mood for all that follows as the members of a family facing crises on several fronts cope by isolating themselves from each other and behaving recklessly.
On the first page, 17-year-old Finn announces to the reader that he is overpoweringly in love with his former babysitter Jess, with whom he’s been sexually active for months. Unfortunately, 22-year-old Jess is seriously dating Eric, the older brother of Finn’s friend Eli. Drunk, high, and distraught when Jess goes off with Eric at a party, Finn passes out in the snow and ends up losing his right hand. That same night, Finn’s father, Michael, who runs a large real estate management company, and mother, Mia, a banker-turned-photographer, learn that Michael’s partner and supposedly close friend Peter has not only funneled money out of the company, but has also cheated Michael out of his ownership. Instead of spending time with his son, Michael deals with his fury and grief about both his own and Finn’s crises by obsessively practicing baseball with a street kid about Finn’s age, developing a relationship that is creepy and potentially dangerous. Meanwhile, Mia resents that she always has to be the strong one in her marriage and goes on what she calls “unauthorized maternity leave”—really, leave from maternity and matrimony. Both parents are clueless about Finn’s inner turmoil concerning the loss of his hand and about the complex geometry of love triangles involving Finn with Jess, Eric, Peter’s teenage daughter, Frankie (who loves Finn), and Eli (who loves Frankie). Proulx’s teens are sympathetically if sharply realistic, but the ugliness of the adult characters’ behavior bludgeons the reader beyond endurance.
No one in this world of selfishness, vengefulness, and obsession seems aware what kind of collateral damage their bad choices—whether misguided or malevolent—will have on others.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1245-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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