Moore’s readers may find this book cuts a little too close to home.
The members of a high-achieving Marin County family face their fears: applying to college, blowing a deal, revealing their secrets.
It’s a tense year for the Hawthornes. Nora, a real estate agent, is trying to get past a dry spell by finding a buyer for the Watkins house, which the current owners insist on pricing slightly too high at $8.8 million. Gabe, a consultant, is trying to avoid his firm’s overconfident new intern, who seems to think she has something on him. (Spoiler alert: she does, and it won’t take long to figure out what it is.) Oldest daughter Angela, the class valedictorian, is applying to college—one college only: her father’s alma mater, Harvard—and popping pills to keep up with her homework and extracurricular commitments. Middle daughter Cecily has always been the happy child, excelling at the offbeat activity of Irish dance, but something seems to be troubling her. And youngest daughter Maya, who’s in second grade, still doesn’t know how to read; Nora secretly worries that it’s her fault, since Maya fell on her head as a baby while her mother was busy on a work call. Each chapter is told from a different character’s viewpoint, but perhaps because women like Nora are the book’s target audience, it’s she who really comes alive—and it’s her tension that permeates the book. Nora’s brain is always running through to-do lists, and her anxiety is contagious. Not pleasant anxiety, the kind you feel when you’re reading a Stephen King novel. The unpleasant kind you feel in your own life when you have too much to do and too little time to get it done. She spends two pages, on and off, thinking about the dishwasher—how it’s still running, how she could have hand-washed the dishes faster, how she finally unloaded it. Moore (So Far Away, 2012, etc.), has an excellent eye for the minutiae of upper-middle-class life, but it gets exhausting immersing yourself in another family’s worries on top of your own.
Moore’s readers may find this book cuts a little too close to home.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-54004-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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