An awkward mix of realism and soap opera that, despite intriguing characters, never quite coheres.
From Danish-language poet and short-story author Aidt (Baboon, 2014) comes her first novel, a domestic drama that merges the mundane and the grotesque.
A father dies, and his two children are left to settle his affairs. They are Thomas and Jenny, and they sling insults at the dead old man, a criminal and drunk who was never around much. (“In our family the men don’t take very good care of their children,” Jenny jokes. “It’s a tradition.”) But Thomas discovers something among his father’s possessions: an unnerving amount of cash stowed away in a toaster oven. At first, he doesn’t know what to do with it; as the manager of a paper and office supply shop, he’s a somewhat repressed and timid man—which means, of course, that readers of Aidt’s short stories will know he’s primed for an explosion. The novel focuses on Thomas’ interpersonal relationships—with his wife, his niece, his business partner, etc.—all of which are fraught and simmering, and Aidt does a great job showing his incremental movements into frenzy, especially in details like his cigarette intake, which steadily mounts. But Aidt slips when handling her bigger emotional moments. Sometimes these slips are minor, as in one scene of rage that becomes unnecessarily silly when a character yells, “shitassfucking.” In other cases, the slips turn to spills, and Aidt has a difficult time getting back up—especially after a rape scene midway through that seems unconvincingly abrupt and out of character. Aidt has a sense for the rhythms of everyday life, but too often, she tries to shock readers. There’s great literature to be made about the balance between the mundane and the violent, but Aidt never stitches these two tones together.
An awkward mix of realism and soap opera that, despite intriguing characters, never quite coheres.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-940953-16-8
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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
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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