A poignant story of the power of faith, hope, and love to transcend loss.
It's been a year since little Maddie Kelly did not wake up from her afternoon nap, yet Hope cannot stop mourning her youngest daughter.
Hope’s husband, Jack, a Maine lobsterman, has buried himself in his work, unable to face his faltering marriage. He can barely pay the bills, and finishing the renovations on the Salt House, their dream house, seems impossible. Meanwhile, their older daughters, Jess and Kat, have been tiptoeing around the powder keg of emotions. But a dinner party for Hope’s friend Peggy sets into motion a series of dramatic collisions. It all begins with Peggy’s new husband, Ryland Finn, who shares a dark past with Jack. Finn’s drunken threats to take over some of Jack’s fishing territory anger Jack, but he walks away. Finn isn’t through with Jack, though, and soon Jack is risking his own health to safeguard his territory, tamping down his grief, and keeping the door securely locked against the secret he has hidden from Hope. Meanwhile, Jess heads out to confront the boy who’s been bullying Kat. She gets more than she bargained for, including a tumble off her bike, a sprained ankle, and an uncomfortable encounter with Finn, who turns out to be the bully’s new stepfather. He’s also stepfather to Alex, the young man who patches up Jess’ ankle, drives her home, and begins to fall in love with her. Kat has her own troubles trying to puzzle out why Maddie’s ashes still live in her mother’s closet. Shifting perspective with each chapter, Duffy’s debut novel replicates the isolation of sorrow by letting each character struggle alone to make sense of a world without Maddie. From the heavy hollowness in Jack’s chest to the angry loneliness infecting Hope’s heart, she deftly sketches the edges of grief.
A poignant story of the power of faith, hope, and love to transcend loss.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5655-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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