A true Hamill piece: by turns fascinating, sentimental, hackneyed, and provincial in the best New York mode. It won’t play...
Journalist and author Hamill (the novel Loving Women, 1989; Why Sinatra Matters, 1998, etc.) offers a chronicle of 250 years of Manhattan life as experienced by an immortal Irish immigrant.
Growing up in the Ulster countryside in the 18th century, Robert Carson was constantly regaled with tales of the chieftains and warriors who’d fought over Erin across the centuries. As a Protestant, Robert was inclined to have more sympathy than most Irishmen with the English and Scots—until his mother was killed by the English Earl of Warren and Robert’s father revealed to him that his true name was Cormac O’Connor. The O’Connors have secretly preserved the Irish language and the ancient (pre-Christian) religion, and Cormac is now inducted into the family mysteries. Vowing revenge for his mother’s death, he sets off in pursuit of Warren but finds that he’s left for America. So Cormac boards ship and lands in Manhattan in 1741. Soon, he gets work in a printing shop run by a German immigrant named John Peter Zenger, eventually becoming a kind of journalist who roams the city’s back alleys and reports the gossip and events of the day. In the aftermath of a slave revolt, Cormac saves the life of an African magician and is granted the power of immortality—provided he never sets foot off Manhattan Island. Not a bad deal, since it allows the ever-observant Cormac to be eyewitness to some of history’s greatest spectacles—from the American Revolution to the Draft Riots, from the rise and fall of Tammany Hall to the stock market crash. Oh, and that business of September 11, 2001, too. Like all real New Yorkers, Cormac doesn’t mind being trapped in Manhattan: He’s doesn’t even know there’s anywhere else.
A true Hamill piece: by turns fascinating, sentimental, hackneyed, and provincial in the best New York mode. It won’t play in Poughkeepsie, but there are plenty of New Yorkers (and New York-ophiles) who will love it.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-34111-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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