A would-be thriller in dire need of a script doctor.
A woman awakes from an extended coma to find her world utterly changed.
Coming home from the hospital, LA producer Michelle gradually learns some awful truths about the car accident which impaired her memory and crippled her right arm. Most alarmingly, 19-year-old Noah (her son Tyler's pitching coach) died in the crash after Michelle’s SUV slid off the road into Topanga Canyon—and Michelle has no idea what he was doing in her car. Her husband, sound engineer Drew, has relocated to New York, where he’s enrolled Tyler in prep school. And daughter Nikki is missing. Michelle is being sued by Noah’s parents for wrongful death, and her own lawsuit against the SUV manufacturer is undermined by the fact she may have ignored a seat belt recall notice. Her family has been virtually bankrupted by her medical expenses and cannot afford to pay her attorney. Since she has zero recollection of either the accident or the events surrounding it, Michelle launches her own investigation, which she hopes will also lead her to Nikki’s whereabouts. She pieces together a progressively more complex scenario: Noah was well on the way to rock stardom when he died; Michelle herself had, pro bono, produced a video for his band, Roadhouse. In fact, her former Hollywood colleagues have seemingly turned on her and are making a biopic about Noah that may prejudice the outcome of the lawsuits. A Roadhouse groupie produces a photo card containing shots showing Nikki and Noah kissing. This takes some of the onus off Michelle (whose cougardom some gossips were blaming for Noah’s presence in her car). Now that Nikki could be a material witness, it is even more imperative that Michelle track her down. A postcard sent to Noah’s mother from Hawaii provides the first tangible clue, which lures Michelle to Maui. Despite the intriguing premise, the disjointed and meandering narrative and phoned-in prose tamp down both suspense and forward momentum.
A would-be thriller in dire need of a script doctor.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-7956-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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