A funny and touching fable about love for kids, even the ones on fire.
Decades after an unforgivable trespass, two childhood friends are reunited in a most unusual arrangement.
Wilson is a remarkable writer for many different reasons, as demonstrated by his quirky novels, Perfect Little World (2017) and The Family Fang (2011), and tons of short stories. One of his greatest strengths is the ability to craft an everyday family drama and inject it with one odd element that turns the story on its head. He’s done it again here, writing once more about family but with some most unusual children and a particularly charming narrator. Back in the day, Lillian and Madison were besties at an elite boarding school, the former a smart scholarship student and the latter a quirky but spoiled rich girl. But when Madison got into trouble, privilege reared its ugly head, and Lillian was the one kicked out of school. Now grown, she spends her days at her dead-end job and her off hours getting stoned. Out of the blue, Madison reappears, now mother to her darling boy, Timothy, and the wife of a U.S. senator and budding political star. But the family is in a quandary over what to do with the senator’s twin children from a previous marriage, Bessie and Roland. Oh, and by the way, the twins spontaneously combust when they’re angry or upset. No harm comes to them, but clothes, houses, and anything else in their orbit can go up in flames. Lillian is offered a job looking after the twins for the summer until the fam can figure out what to do with the little fireballs. To her own surprise, Lillian turns out to be a terrific guardian, despite her own doubts. “They were me, unloved and fucked over, and I was going to make sure they got what they needed,” she affirms. The book’s denouement is a bit predictable, but Lillian develops into an engaging parental proxy in Wilson’s latest whimsical exploration of family.
A funny and touching fable about love for kids, even the ones on fire.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-291346-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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