The characters are so affecting it’s tough to make it to Day 5. An authentic and powerful story.
Timmer’s emotional debut about saying goodbye should come with a box of tissues.
Scott Coffman has five days until the little boy he’s been caring for returns to his birth mother; Mara Nichols is five days away from killing herself before Huntington’s disease can steal her independence. The two meet anonymously in an online therapy forum, and although their paths never cross in real life, Timmer deftly compares their shared dilemmas of when and how to let go. Mara’s husband dotes on her, while her parents, colleagues and the friends her daughter adorably calls “those ladies” are unwavering in their support. It’s only through the harsher lens of the outside world that we see the devastating effects of Mara’s disease, from the awkward gait that makes her look drunk to the kids at her daughter’s school to the woman who tries too hard to help after seeing Mara soil herself in the grocery aisle. As the countdown continues, seemingly normal moments carry more weight than Mara can bear; at one point, she compares the sound of a dial tone to the “one-note dirge” of a flat-lining EKG machine. Scott can relate. He’s trying to cram in as many bedtime stories and home-cooked meals as he can before sending Curtis back to his junkie mother, who often let the boy go hungry. But Scott’s pregnant wife, Laurie, fears Curtis’ behavioral problems might be more than their family can handle long-term. Scott’s dread at sending Curtis home is almost as hard to digest as the uncomfortable truth that Laurie may have a point. Is it selfish for Scott to put the boy’s needs before his wife’s? Is it more selfish for Mara to abandon her family now than to ask them to care for her in the final stages of her disease? As Scott and Mara wrestle with ethical questions, the answers they find are both relatable and debatable.
The characters are so affecting it’s tough to make it to Day 5. An authentic and powerful story.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16734-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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