Clever writing about an awkward character.
This debut novel from Melbourne-based writer Collette replaces the chubby, clumsy rom-com heroine of yore with a mathematically smart, socially inept protagonist in need of redemption.
Germaine’s long tenure at an insurance company ends ignominiously, forcing her to take a job at the city-run Senior Citizens Helpline, where—in a self-guided attempt to decrease call times—she is farcically unhelpful. Regardless, Mayor Verity Bainbridge taps Germaine to help with a special project for a special friend. The friend, amazingly, is one of Germaine’s heroes—disgraced sudoku champion Alan Cosgrove, now in charge of the local golf course. The project: reprimand the elderly managers of the nearby senior center who've recently put chains on the tires of golfers using the center's parking lot. Germaine, fancying herself friends with the mayor, is all too happy to comply; she also imagines a burgeoning romance with Alan Cosgrove. The only problem is that, as her interactions with the senior-center staff unfold, she finds her loyalties shifting. Or at least she feels increasingly uncomfortable with her civic role, which is nearly the best she can do in terms of self-awareness. Luckily, she has boatloads of supporters—co-workers, the seniors, a neighbor, her mother, and, obviously, a love interest—to prod her (painstakingly) toward morally and romantically positive outcomes. Writing from Germaine's perspective has pros: Readers get detailed explanations of her entertainingly particular logic while still seeing more poignant aspects of her inner life, and Collette includes enough clues about what's going on around Germaine to show the often very funny disconnect between the two. But because Germaine is not a naturally empathetic or kind character, it is difficult to know how her scrappy fan club determines she's worthy of their loyalty.
Clever writing about an awkward character.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1133-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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