Everything this great American author’s fans are looking for.
The long second act of a New England writer’s life, rich in family, laced with troubles personal and public.
Maynard’s 18th book is a stirring, satisfying sequel to Count the Ways (2021), continuing the story of New England children’s book author Eleanor through the years 2010 to 2024, including the Trump election, Covid-19, the Jan. 6 insurrection, school shootings, and lots and lots of great American music playing in the background. The book’s title comes from a Leonard Cohen song, and John Prine, who died of Covid in 2020, presides over the story. As the author puts it in a note, “I never met him, but in these pages, I honor his musical legacy of humor, wisdom, passion, and tenderness.” As in all Maynard’s best work, those qualities are in evidence throughout. A prologue recaps an event central to the first book—an accident that resulted in a brain injury to Eleanor’s youngest child, in the wake of which Eleanor’s marriage to Cam slowly but surely crumbled. In Part 1, called The Death of Cam, the babysitter he left her for is history, and when Cam falls ill, none of their other children is available to care for him and their brain-damaged brother, so Eleanor moves back from Brookline to the family farm to do the job. Oldest child Al lives on the West Coast and is now fully transitioned, married to a woman, enjoying career success, and hoping to adopt. Middle child Ursula is a mother of three, lives in Vermont, and is married to a high school friend named Jake who morphs into a scary Proud Boy–type in the Trump years. Ursula is deeply estranged from her mother and treats her cruelly; one of the numerous plot threads traces the evolution of this painful situation. Others follow Eleanor’s jet-setting romance with a famous climate change warrior; various projects to commercialize and Hollywood-ize her books; a sexual abuse scandal; and most centrally, this question: “A good mother. Who even knows what that is?” This ample narrative is arranged into tasty vignettes with appealing, sometimes funny subtitles, making it a pleasure to digest.
Everything this great American author’s fans are looking for.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780062398307
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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