Errs on the side of the pat and predictable.
Three middle-aged sisters gather to consider the fate of their family property on Martha’s Vineyard.
How does one family cope with the trauma of losing a 15-acre seaside spread that has been theirs since Colonial times? Especially if they are descended from the Daggetts, one of the founding families of Martha’s Vineyard? After their mother passes away, the McCarthy sisters, Dar, Delia and Rory, converge on Daggett’s Way, their rustic vacation home, to pack up memorabilia. Daggett’s Way is listed for sale because the sisters can afford neither to maintain it nor pay spiraling property taxes and inheritance taxes. There is an offer on the table from obnoxious buyers who plan to tear the historic place down and construct a vulgar facsimile of a French chateau, complete with indoor pool. Particularly hard hit by the prospect of losing her birthright is eldest daughter Dar, a graphic novelist whose manga altar ego Dulse can affect reality in ways Dar can’t. As for her sisters, Delia’s marriage is threatened by son Pete’s meth addiction. Rory, mother of three, compulsively cyberstalks her ex, Jonathan, who left her for a younger woman. Years before, the sisters’ father, Michael McCarthy, an Irish immigrant boat-builder who always felt threatened by his Daggett in-laws’ wealth, disappeared after a solo voyage to Ireland aboard his hand-crafted sailing sloop. Dar recalls that her father had some crazy notion that in 1625 or so King Charles I had granted his family a tract of land within the Daggett parcel’s boundaries. Not stopping to worry about how it’s going to help them prove that they have an ancient title to land they already own, the sisters head off to Ireland, where they learn that Michael’s madness was indeed methodical. Rich veins of conflict go unmined, and the most interesting characters are peripheral, including Harrison, a dispossessed Vineyardite who copes in a most original way with the loss of his own family fiefdom.
Errs on the side of the pat and predictable.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02250-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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