A young girl must harness the power of her maternal line to help her mother in this debut novel.
Angela lives for the beauty of Ukraine in a simple life with her mother, Lyuda. While Angela discovers that she can become a bird, Lyuda slips into a depression, aided by the vodka she sips at night. Her own mother is dead, Angela’s father has left them, and while Lyuda’s childhood friend Sveta is their neighbor, she has not spoken to her in years. One afternoon by the river, Angela meets the spirit of her grandmother and is tasked with bringing out the memories in Lyuda that haunt her. The ethereal realm collides with reality as Lyuda is shown a different life: one where Volodiya, Angela’s father, stays to love her and provide her with an elegant home. But something is missing from this alternative universe: there is no daughter. She aches for Sveta’s daughter, Maria, to be her own, even as heartbreaking news about her own fertility is revealed. Which life is more worth living, the one without Volodiya, or the one without Angela? The spirit of her mother and daughter both will have to work hard to bring epiphany to Lyuda’s heavy heart. The scenery that Meriel’s tale inhabits is lush, with lilac bushes, golden sunshine, and delicious food. The narration switches liberally from character to character and from first person to third person, which can make it occasionally hard to follow, especially when Angela assumes her bird form. But while the magical realism of this evocative novel is sometimes-opaque, the story is never lost, grounded in Lyuda’s internal monologue and vivid memories. There are some chapters that lack nuance, such as the scenes written from Volodiya’s perspective, that of a young man burdened by his abusive father and, later, Lyuda’s pregnancy. By far, the book’s women are the most compelling characters, especially when Lyuda’s hard-earned acceptance of one of her paths is expressed in the final chapters. Readers looking for a classic tale of love and loss will be rewarded with an intoxicating world, especially if they can follow the more magical plotlines.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Granite Cloud
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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