A slow-paced but thoughtful tale that will reward patient readers.
In the wake of a tragedy, a Canadian woman leaves her job and home for the solace of a small island in Quennec’s debut novel.
After her husband, Jeff, and both of his parents die in a car accident, Kate is left floating through life like an “apparition,” emotionally unmoored. She boldly decides to leave her job as a newspaper editor and her home in her native Vancouver Island, British Columbia, for nearby Britannia Island in the Salish Sea, in search of peace and some measure of rejuvenation. Once there, however, she’s forced to face the grim reality that her marriage was in trouble long before Jeff died and that he may have been unfaithful to her—and the darker truth that she may be culpable in his death. Kate feels encouraged in her soul-searching after she meets Ivy, a fascinating woman in her twilight years who’s “strong and vital in so many ways, yet stuck in a body that didn't even work well enough to eat independently.” Ivy relates a past crisis of her own: In 1926, just before she attended college, she visited her German grandparents at Isla de Piños, a small Cuban island caught in the country’s struggle for independence from the United States. There, Ivy began a torrid affair with Emilio, a young Cuban, but her grandparents strongly disapproved, citing the unbridgeable cultural chasm that separated them. Quennec sensitively probes Kate’s and Ivy’s respective romantic crises, with the former seeming to seek a reprieve from life and the latter, a recommitment to it. The author conveys the story from three distinct perspectives: Kate’s, Ivy’s, and Kate’s mother Nora’s. Over the course of the novel, Quennec delicately exposes Kate’s deepest fear that, despite her lust for life, she is, in fact, unworthy of finding happiness in it. At a dinner party with other women, for instance, Kate thinks, “Soon enough they will see her for who she is, a frightened, unworldly child. She can almost predict the onset of their disappointment once she’s revealed enough of herself.” Quennec has a gimlet eye for this kind of unexpressed terror, which she ably portrays when Kate meets Luke, an earnest environmental consultant who takes a real interest in her. Ivy’s past is unraveled in a similarly poignant manner, as the young woman frets that she’s as narrowly provincial as her grandparents are—a theory that Emilio offers her, none too generously. Nora’s plight, however, is considerably less engrossing and certainly less dramatic than the others’, as her conventional married life is upended by the unprovoked attentions of a male admirer. In fact, her flat, formulaic narrative is so incongruent with the other two that it seems misplaced. Also, the author unfurls the plot at a pace so languorous that it may lose some readers’ attention at times. Overall, though, her novel offers an astute examination of the despair engendered by solitude and of the paradoxical consolations it delivers.
A slow-paced but thoughtful tale that will reward patient readers.Pub Date: July 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77133-613-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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