An appealing family saga that connects generations and reaffirms love.
Harmel (The Life Intended, 2014, etc.) returns with a family drama that spans generations.
Freelance writer Emily Emerson loses her paycheck and dignity when her relationship column folds unexpectedly. Her time wallowing in self-pity is cut short when a surprise package arrives from Germany. Inside is a painting of a woman Emily recognizes as her late grandmother, only she doesn’t know who sent the package or what it means, as the accompanying note simply states, “Your grandfather never stopped loving her.” Determined to find out more about the painting and her broken family history, Emily sets out on a sleuthing adventure that reveals dark secrets and painful truths. While she investigates the family’s hidden history, Emily must face her own murky past and confront what she's kept hidden from others for years. The narrative alternates between Emily’s present day and revelations from the past. Harmel skillfully weaves among points of view and timelines, building tension and mystery along the way. Emily is a no-nonsense character with immense likability. She has an elevated sense of protecting her own privacy but has no reservation about digging into others’ flawed histories. Harmel has crafted an endearing narrator with a complex past who simply wants to live an uncomplicated life. Sorting out the family mystery requires Emily to rekindle a relationship with her father, which has its rewards and challenges. Their dynamic provides insight into present and past family matters while interjecting humor and tension that honor father-daughter relationships. Equally compelling is the rich family storyline that traverses generations and geographic locales as Emily uncovers connections between her family and Florida’s POW internment camps. Harmel, an Orlando resident with an eye for detail, authentically weaves American history into this engaging novel.
An appealing family saga that connects generations and reaffirms love.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5416-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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