This worthy attempt to dramatize the extent to which randomness rules our lives is subverted by aimless storytelling.
A lightning strike skews the trajectory of a family.
The opening of Zuravleff’s second novel reads like a case history straight out of the annals of Oliver Sacks. Owen, a psychiatrist who specializes in pharmacological solutions to childhood neuropathologies ranging from ADHD to Asperger’s, is feeding a parking meter with quarters when he’s struck by lightning. His burns and nerve damage will heal with time, but the most intractable effect Owen suffers, besides a tendency to blurt uncomfortable truths, is a sudden and unprecedented passion for all things barbecue. Wife Toni, a professional recruiter of university presidents, becomes Owen’s full-time caregiver, which thoroughly upends her hitherto upscale Washington, D.C., suburban routine. The impact is felt by their children, twins Will and Ricky, juniors, respectively, at Penn and Duke, and teenage daughter Brooke, a talented gymnast. Will, addicted to pills and casual hookups, comes even more unglued when his prized 10-speed is trashed by marauding drunken frat boys. Ricky, a “math and myth geek,” is involved in an unhealthy flirtation with a charismatic professor and her husband. Brooke, whose vocabulary prowess almost equals her skill on the balance beam, fully indulges Zuravleff’s penchant for variegated and ornate phraseology. Since her parents have been so preoccupied, Brooke has been unwilling to confess to them that her boyfriend has crossed a line from jealous to controlling and abusive. Toni is conflicted about her new role, in part since she suspects (correctly) that Owen is fantasizing about Will’s girlfriend, Kyra, and also due to her own close brush with adultery. The Thanksgiving feast, which Owen will prepare in his newly dug backyard pit, may be the occasion for the family itself to tumble into a much deeper hole. Although the progress of domestic entropy is minutely charted, Owen’s affliction, obviously intended as the infernal engine of family dysfunction, ultimately seems beside the point.
This worthy attempt to dramatize the extent to which randomness rules our lives is subverted by aimless storytelling.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-20231-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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