An honest and poignant account of a woman attempting to build a future on the ruins of the past.
With her first fiction, memoirist O’Faolain (Are You Somebody?, 1998) offers an expansive work touching on the nature of passion, loss, and hope.
Approaching 50, Kathleen de Burca finds her life a tidy ruin: a travel writer for decades, she’s led a life that may seem glamorous and exciting, yet she has little to show for her wandering years, which seem now less like exploring than simply running away. “The older I got,” she says “the heavier my burden of not having been happy yet.” At the death of her dearest friend, Kathleen decides to quit her job and return to her native Ireland, where she hasn’t set foot since she was 20, to research a little-known divorce case from near the end of the Great Potato Famine (1845–49). She hopes to discover grand passion between the English Marianne Talbot and her Irish stable groom William Mullen, but all she finds are questions—and buried, haunting memories of her own. A nesting box of stories, her narrative slips from the present to a full recounting of her past, then to the distant past in the fairy tale she begins writing about Marianne and William. Not surprisingly, she elevates their love, something she’s had little of in her own life. Involved in one debasing sexual experience after another (including a submission to her aged London landlord simply because he asks for it in lieu of paying a clean-up fee), Kathleen is now left to confront the lonely shape of the life she’s created and the Ireland she left behind. In a lyrical and often brutal account of Irish life, the Talbot affair and even the misery of her own parents become sins of the dead bearing down on the living. Kathleen’s journey home, though, provides the needed catharsis and introduces her, as well, to a man who will love her—if she chooses.
An honest and poignant account of a woman attempting to build a future on the ruins of the past.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2001
ISBN: 1-57322-177-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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