Moore raises some interesting issues about class and the importance of money to happiness, but by solving her characters’...
Moore (The Admissions, 2015, etc.) offers a mildly thoughtful, mainly comforting slice of domestic pie in this story of a wealthy woman who temporarily returns to the working-class town of her youth.
Eliza, a 37-year-old mother of two, has never felt completely at ease among her well-off neighbors in upscale Barton, Massachusetts, although her struggling architect husband, Rob, happens to be heir to a fortune and already owns a sailboat worth six figures. After receiving a call that her father has injured himself and needs her help, Eliza leaves her two daughters with Rob and drives to Little Harbor, Maine, only to discover that tough but good-hearted lobsterman Charlie’s health problem is worse than she thought—a brain tumor. Staying longer than expected to care for Charlie, Eliza confronts the choice she made as a teen to leave her first sweetheart, Russell, and the simple life of Little Harbor in order to attend Brown University. She also confronts a not-very-surprising secret she and Russell, still in Little Harbor, have not discussed since their breakup. While avoiding her still-simmering attraction to Russell, Eliza bonds with Mary, a local 17-year-old facing a crisis similar to the one Eliza handled at the same age. Meanwhile, back in Barton, Rob is about to lose his only client, a referral from his mother, whom Eliza has always found overbearing. Rob also carries on a dangerous flirtation with Eliza’s best friend. Less caddish than he sounds, Rob is a good father, loves Eliza, and is trying hard to be more than a spoiled rich kid; this is a novel in which everyone (with one cartoonishly villainous exception) is ultimately good-hearted and well-behaved.
Moore raises some interesting issues about class and the importance of money to happiness, but by solving her characters’ problems too neatly and painlessly she undercuts the novel’s seriousness, turning it into a Lifetime matinee.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54125-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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