After tracing the family’s dark history, the tragic story ends on a more hopeful note for the next generation.
Characters excavate the past in order to illuminate the present.
The author hits the ground running with a scene in which a woman we will soon come to know as a loving, nurturing nanny lashes out with a kitchen knife at her employer, a woman we will soon come to know as a nasty narcissist. Moving from decade to decade and back and forth across the ocean from Manila to Berkeley, Calif., this is a compelling tale of tragic family secrets. Amparo, the daughter of upper-class parents, has an abortion. Worried about what gossip will do to the family honor, the mother, Señora Concha, banishes her daughter to America, where Amparo gets work as an interpreter in Berkeley. There, she meets and falls in love with her yoga teacher and connects with her mother’s brother, also banished from the family home, years before she was born. Beverly (named for Beverly Hills), from a poor, servant-class family, gets herself to California by putting her photo up on a website where American men look for Filipina mail-order brides. Beverly ends up with a man acting out a cycle of domestic violence that began in his own childhood, and she plans to leave him as soon as she can secretly save enough money to buy tickets for herself and their young daughter to go back to Manila. Beverly and Amparo meet by chance in Berkeley, but Beverly suffers a tragic death before she and Amparo can discover their blood connection. When Amparo learns that Beverly was the result of her uncle’s long-ago affair with her own nanny’s sister, she steps up with her boyfriend to adopt the child Beverly left behind.
After tracing the family’s dark history, the tragic story ends on a more hopeful note for the next generation.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-23984-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL Accent/Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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