A haunting story that will remind many of Ondaatje’s The English Patient—and that merits the comparison.
Georgetown professor, NPR commentator, and first-novelist Callanan expertly fictionalizes one of WWII’s least-known stories.
The phenomenon of Japanese balloon bombs carrying both explosives and lethal germs to Alaska and the northwestern US is disclosed to, and monitored by, narrator Louis Belk, a young Army Air Corps sergeant trained as a bomb disposal specialist. In a dual narrative, we follow Louis’s experiences at his base in Anchorage and environs and also those a half-century later, when he spends his final days as a Catholic priest in the Alaskan wilderness at the deathbed of Yup’ik Eskimo Ronnie, a self-destructive alcoholic and professed shaman. Haunting motifs drawn from Yup’ik legend emerge in the moribund Ronnie’s tall tales, which loom in the reader’s awareness as parallels to the younger Louis’s guilt when a bomb he’s too inexperienced to defuse kills several comrades. Even more compromising emotions are churned up by his relationships with two other major characters: one is Lily, a beautiful half-breed prostitute and nominal “palm reader” who seems unusually attuned to the “spirit world” later evoked by the dying Ronnie; the other is her lover (and Louis’s superior officer), Captain Gurley, a hard-bitten, sardonic, wounded veteran who bullies and taunts his young subordinate into assisting his quest to persuade the Army that “the Japs . . . have reached North America.” Callanan’s complex plot tightens neatly when Gurley learns of Lily’s intimacy with Saburo, a Japanese fisherman (and perhaps spy) who’d disappeared into an uncharted forest—and leads Louis and Lily on an expedition that becomes a voyage of bitter discovery. In a climactic deathbed scene, Callanan brilliantly connects the fate of a boy sent across the ocean in a balloon with the shaman’s tale of a ceaselessly crying child—and with the last-revealed of Lily’s secrets.
A haunting story that will remind many of Ondaatje’s The English Patient—and that merits the comparison.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33694-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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