Warm-hearted and well-written, if a trifle pat.
A Japanese war bride and her American daughter lay bare family secrets and heal old wounds in Dilloway’s poignant debut.
At the end of the war, 18-year-old Shoko had to go to work so her younger brother Taro could finish school, even though she was the better student. As a girl, her mission was to find a husband, and her father hoped she would marry one of the American occupiers, though her brother hated them. But Shoko fell in love with Ronin, a member of the “untouchable” caste still despised in modern Japan, and only married kindly American Charlie after Ronin was killed. We learn all this from the elderly Shoko, settled in San Diego since Charlie retired from the Navy and now facing surgery for a heart condition, probably a legacy of radiation from the bomb blast at Nagasaki, 50 miles from her childhood home. Though Taro has refused to communicate with his sister since she married an American, Shoko has unfinished business in her homeland, and when her doctor forbids her to make the trip, she persuades daughter Sue to go in her stead. Sue, a divorcée with a preteen daughter and a paper-pushing job that bores her, has always felt that she disappointed her mother—and in fact, Shoko’s narration of Part One reveals a cranky, difficult woman, unable to show love except by criticizing and still carrying around a load of resentments from her childhood. Part Two, Sue’s account of her visit to Japan, is considerably softer-edged; she meets two welcoming cousins and manages to crack Taro’s grumpy façade, collecting the white funeral kimono Shoko has requested of him and eliciting fond memories of his sister as a baseball-playing tomboy in prewar Japan. The transition is a little abrupt, and the closing sections are more reassuring than Shoko’s narration led us to expect. Readers looking for a strong story that turns out well for sympathetically rendered characters will not complain.
Warm-hearted and well-written, if a trifle pat.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15637-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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