Roosevelt knows her terrain, but it remains unclear if she meant this family portrait to be as unflattering as it is.
The great-granddaughter of Eleanor and Franklin writes about members of a fictional elite family struggling to shape their individual identities.
When Roger Whitby Jr. dies, his many children from his first three marriages (family tree provided) discover that he has bequeathed the little left of the Whitby fortune to his fourth wife’s son, Nick, whom he adopted. Although the plot is ostensibly about inheritance, the older, barely fleshed-out nonheirs are remarkably nonchalant about getting nothing; only Shelley, from marriage No. 3, and Brooke, from No. 2, fear losing the family houses where they were raised and still live, though it seems unlikely that Nick, unreachable after having participated in an environmental protest gone awry, will be greedy. The true subject here, developed through memories of childhoods and marriages, is the ambivalent love Nick, Shelley, and Brooke feel for Roger, who abandoned each differently. By the time the 21-year-old Nick eventually shows up at 22-year-old Shelley’s Upper West Side brownstone, she is in a creepy sexual liaison with her new employer, Kamal, a blind Egyptian architect. Nick begins a romance with Kamal’s naïve, intellectual daughter, whom he involves in his Occupy Wall Street–type activity. Meanwhile, in Boston, 37-year-old nurse Brooke wants to keep her Beacon Hill house for the baby she’s conceived sleeping with a nouveau riche Italian-American to avoid acknowledging she might be gay. Brooke’s disdain for her sex-mate reflects Whitby snobbery and perhaps the author’s—Nick’s pointedly middle-class mother is also portrayed as crassly mercenary compared to Roger’s previous aristocratic wives, while Nick’s lefty friends are beyond the pale. Given the Whitby kids’ claims to shun their privileged advantages, the frequent references to fancy schools and Martha’s Vineyard vacations wear thin. The Whitbys increasingly come across as spoiled, self-absorbed, and ultimately trivial poor rich kids.
Roosevelt knows her terrain, but it remains unclear if she meant this family portrait to be as unflattering as it is.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4317-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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