Striking style, memorable characters, and a believably miraculous premise add up to a beautifully crafted first novel.
By turns lyrical and gritty, a moving family story focuses on the aftermath of miracles.
From its opening pages, this debut novel juxtaposes the realities of life for a working-class Hawaiian family and the mysticism of the Native culture that shapes them, with surprising results. Augie and Malia and their children—sons Dean and Nainoa and daughter Kaui—find their lives forever changed when, during a boat tour, little Noa falls overboard and is rescued by sharks, unharmed, as witnessed by a boatload of passengers. It’s an echo of old legends that is reinforced a few years later when the boy heals an accident victim’s injuries (although his mother offers an origin story that suggests he was marked by the old gods from conception). Noa’s gift is a source of both wonder and cold hard cash, not to mention a baffling burden for a kid. In chapters narrated in turn by each member of the family, the siblings grow up, Dean and Kaui always feeling they are in their brother’s shadow, all of them balancing on the edge of poverty. Dean is a talented athlete, Noa and Kaui top students, and Augie and Malia manage to send all three to the mainland for college. But with the family fractured, all of them struggle, and only some find redemption. Washburn’s prose is lush and inventive; a native of Hawai’i, he portrays the islands and their people with insight and love. He skillfully creates distinct voices for each of his narrators: resentful Dean, wisecracking Kaui, happy-go-lucky Augie, and Malia the true believer: “The kingdom of Hawai’i had long been broken—the hot rain forests and breathing green reefs crushed under the haole commerce of beach resorts, skyscrapers—and that was when the land had begun calling. I know this now because of you.” That ”you” is Noa, sweet and bighearted and wrecked by his unasked-for powers. Their stories go in unexpected directions, from hilarious to heartbreaking.
Striking style, memorable characters, and a believably miraculous premise add up to a beautifully crafted first novel.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-27208-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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