An earnest first novel from anthologist/storyteller White (American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Stories by Emerging Writers, Vols. I-IV) that's rooted firmly in the frontier between mystery and mainstream fiction. Desert Storm is in the headlines when Wolfgang Kallick comes from Erfurt to Moosehead Lake, Maine, to find out what happened to his brother Dieter in that other war 45 years ago. The official story is that Dieter, a POW who'd been shipped to the Sheshuncook logging camp, drowned following an escape attempt two months before V-E Day. But Wolfgang has heard rumors that his brother's body had unexplained head wounds, and now he wants to put the case to rest. In upstate Maine, whose denizens hardly talk to neighbors they've known for years, everyone gives Wolfgang the cold shoulder—even old Libby Pelletier, the Country Kitchen owner who'd be more sympathetic if she weren't preoccupied with problems of her own. Libby's been the matriarch of her family since her mother ran off back in 1943, leaving behind her brusquely unsympathetic husband Ambroise and two scared teenagers, Libby and her kid brother Leon. Now Leon, exhausted from his latest bout of d.t.'s, is home from the hospital, and Libby has her hands full, especially when he tells her not to have anything to do with the Kraut. Shortly after, though, Leon himself is found frozen to death, and Libby, frazzled by the obligatory threatening phone calls, the attack on her dog, and the repeated flashbacks to 1945 that engulf her, finally agrees to talk to Wolfgang Kallick—only to find him too another accident victim soon after. With her own brother's blood as well as Wolfgang's crying out for revenge, Libby goes on the offensive, though the revelation she flushes out will surprise only newcomers to the Buried Secret subgenre. The mystery plot is tired and slack, but White's lovely way with Libby's cracked voice may well win his share of crossover readers.
Pub Date: Oct. 9, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-018667-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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