A troubled era in America’s past brought to life.
A Hollywood publicist’s daughter idolizes movie star Ingrid Bergman.
It’s 1959, and Jesse Malloy, a confirmed New Yorker, is assailing the still-impenetrable glass ceiling at Newsweek when she receives an unexpected invitation—to attend the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. She left her California girlhood behind in 1950 to attend Bennington College, and the invitation spurs memories and an extended flashback to a time when the destiny of her small family became intertwined with that of the luminous Bergman. In spottily period-appropriate language, a sun-dappled period in Jesse’s life is revisited. Jesse’s father, Gabriel, is a studio publicist whose career has skyrocketed, along with Bergman’s, thanks to his shrewd positioning of the movie Casablanca. The family buys a Beverly Hills mansion with a pool. Jesse’s mother, Vanessa, a devout Roman Catholic, enrolls Jesse at Saint Ann’s, an all-girls Catholic school, where her sojourn is remarkably trauma-free. The true milestones of Jesse’s adolescence are her brief encounters with Bergman. Her admiration for the star morphs into affinity when Saint Ann’s, through the good offices of Gabriel, is selected as the location for The Bells of St. Mary’s. Thanks to this film and her later star-vehicle Joan of Arc, Bergman becomes the darling of the Catholic Church and its censorious minions the Legion of Decency, whose movie ratings terrorize Hollywood. When Bergman leaves her stifling marriage for a liaison with director Roberto Rossellini that results in an out-of-wedlock child, all bets are off. Alcott capably depicts the undercurrents of a family challenged by high stakes and hairpin career turns in the redbaiting blacklist era, but the book is riddled with superfluous come-to-realization moments, such as “I was having my first glimmer of the fact that absolutes are tricky in the real world.” The characters are appealing anyway, and their earnestness and good will, in the face of all that trickiness, are poignant.
A troubled era in America’s past brought to life.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54063-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
