This journey to a place of mindfulness, while inevitably affecting, often reads like fictionalized campaign literature for a...
Best-selling neuroscientist-turned-novelist Genova, author of several popular stories based on the experience of suffering debilitating diseases—notably Still Alice (2009), about a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s—now tackles the impact of Huntington’s disease on one blue-collar Boston family.
Patrol officer Joe O’Brien is third-generation Irish in Charlestown. A tough cop with a soft interior, a loving wife and four adult children, Joe “doesn’t do doctors” but is going to have to learn, because there’s no dodging the diagnosis heading his way—one that Genova outlines on her opening page: Huntington’s is “an inherited neurodegenerative disease characterized by a progressive loss of voluntary motor control…proceeding inexorably to death in ten to twenty years.” Not only is there no cure, but there’s a 50 percent chance that Joe’s children will carry the gene, too. Genova’s straightforward storytelling lays out this unhappy scenario with maximum empathy as she switches between the perspectives of Joe and daughter Katie, a 21-year-old yoga instructor. While the parents worry and the siblings bicker and confront—or don’t—their fears and options, Genova conveys the facts of HD through encounters with doctors and genetic counselors, continuing the education as Joe’s symptoms intensify and the disease, or its possibility, undermines and redefines jobs, finances and relationships. Minor events do occur, but the stiflingly circular topic of the disease drives everything—Joe’s mood swings and suicidal thoughts, his wife’s wavering faith and Katie’s on-and-off wish to know her own fate. Genova’s intention once again is acceptance, and the wrung-out reader bids farewell to the family at a relatively calm and united moment.
This journey to a place of mindfulness, while inevitably affecting, often reads like fictionalized campaign literature for a worthy cause.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1777-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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