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
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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