Beautifully tragic, this should garner Yamanaka the wider attention she deserves.
In this superb seventh novel from Yamanaka (Father of the Four Passages, 2001, etc.), the ghosts of children curse the living, and a young woman finds salvation in early-20th-century Hawaii.
Anah Medeiros finds some consolation in being sent to St. Joseph’s to recover from tuberculosis—she can comfort her young sisters Leah and Aki, already there. And at least away from home, she’ll be safe from her brute of a father, a Portuguese laborer who molests her on drunken mornings, and she can escape her Japanese mother’s decline into numb sorrow. Abandoned at St. Joseph’s, the girls are beaten and berated by the nuns who deem them unclean half-breeds. Only Leah has some joy, in the form of ghostly Seth, a dairyman’s son who died tree-climbing on the grounds. Soon, though, Leah dies, as does fierce Aki, leaving Anah alone, but not alone, as she is now haunted by a crying Leah, a violent, naked Aki, a silent Seth and the legions of children who have died at St. Joseph’s, begging Anah to take them home, feed their hunger, find their mothers. Yamanaka creates a heartbreaking portrait of these ghost children, made more wretched when Anah’s father dies, and in his spirit form begins to abuse Aki and Leah. Anah finds a friend in Sister Mary Deborah, who teaches her everything about beekeeping, and Anah finds love in Ezroh Soares, Seth’s brother. When she turns 18, Ezroh steals her away from St. Joseph’s and into marriage, but Seth puts a curse on Anah that all her children will be girls and monsters. Yamanaka’s magical story of Anah is also an uncompromising depiction of a hard immigrant life in Hawaii, of Chinese opium dens and Japanese laborers and Portuguese cowboys and whites eager to tame the lot of them. Finally, though Anah becomes prosperous in the beekeeping business, Seth’s curse holds sway and Anah must sacrifice what she loves best so the crying ghost children can find their way home to God.
Beautifully tragic, this should garner Yamanaka the wider attention she deserves.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-11015-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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