A timely, ambitious, and uneven effort from an excellent contemporary writer.
The author of Nicotine (2016) and Mislaid (2015) takes readers from CBGB to Washington, D.C.
In 1986, when life at home in the suburbs becomes too stifling, Pam gets on a bus and heads for New York. She's one-half of a truly terrible band when she meets Joe. Her new friend waits tables at a diner and plays bass. Daniel is as obsessed with obscure music as Pam and Joe, but he's more interested in producing than playing. The threesome remains an odd but fully functional unit even after Daniel and Pam start having sex and fall in love, even after Pam has a baby, even after Joe becomes an indie darling. There is no shortage of fiction chronicling young people finding themselves through the punk scene on the Lower East Side, but Zink’s version of this coming-of-age tale is distinctive because her superpower as an author is crafting weirdos and misfits without being excessively charmed by her creations. Pam and Daniel are both flawed and capable of recognizing their flaws. Joe is guileless and incapable of self-analysis, which makes him both intensely lovable and totally eager to play the archetypal rock star. The bonds among this chosen family are beginning to strain when 9/11 happens. After this turning point, the narrative focus begins to shift to Pam and Daniel’s daughter and widen to take in more of the political landscape. Flora’s passion for the environment leads her to a position with Jill Stein’s campaign. There’s something refreshing about Zink’s willingness to name names. When she writes about the last presidential election, she doesn’t create a character who looks a lot like Donald Trump; she writes about Donald Trump. At the same time, it’s an open question how much people who are bombarded by news about Donald Trump all day, every day, want to see his name in a novel. How many people still angry and despondent over 2016 want to relive it through the eyes of a Green Party staffer? More critically, fiction set behind the scenes in Washington doesn’t feel all that compelling when everyone in the real Washington—from politicians to speechwriters to low-level staffers—has an Instagram account.
A timely, ambitious, and uneven effort from an excellent contemporary writer.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-287778-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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