A moving coming-of-age novel that blends thrills and heartfelt familial drama.
In Brandes’ thriller, a young woman must come to terms with her father’s violent past and reconcile with her role in it.
Soon after 30-year-old Tilly Stone’s father, Frank, appears on her doorstep, near the Pennsylvania–New Jersey border, the carefully constructed world she’s built for herself starts to crumble. Seventeen years ago, she was his dutiful disciple; they traveled the country, full of determination to wake up the world to the evils of technology and corporate greed. Their targets were dams, and their explosives were designed not to kill, but to ignite righteous fury. She worshipped her father then, and his mission was hers. Then, one fateful summer, Frank brought Tilly back to his childhood home—the cabin where she’d been born—and promised her that they’d stay there. While he worked as a maintenance person in town, she built a small model cabin from wood scraps and found a passion for woodworking; she also made her first real friend in Henry, a gentle boy her own age. But one night, Frank didn’t come home. She survived, as he’d taught her, and as the years passed, she became a talented furniture maker and forged more connections with others, including Henry’s young son, Finn. She also suffered through visits from the FBI and from fans of her well-known father. Meanwhile, she becomes disillusioned about Frank’s mission, and his reappearance forces her to contend with her past. This hard-to-define novel tugs at the heartstrings and shocks the senses in equal measure. Brandes writes in a gentle, descriptive style, filled with the glories of nature and the darkness of a lonely, isolated life. Tilly’s fierce intelligence and perseverance suggest shades of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Readers will feel deeply for her during her long, arduous emotional journey, but Brandes’ skill also makes it possible to feel empathy for Frank and his cause, even if readers deplore his actions. Ultimately, this is a novel about finding a balance between loving someone and recognizing that sometimes love can be misplaced.
A moving coming-of-age novel that blends thrills and heartfelt familial drama.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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