From nocturnes to punk, this musical romance is ripe for filming.
Stocking only vinyl in his London music shop, Frank Adair has the ability to select the perfect song to ease each customer’s spiritual crisis.
The son of a music-obsessed mother, Frank grew up learning about Beethoven’s silences, Vivaldi’s funeral, Bach’s eyes, and Miles Davis’ sly sense of humor. By the time he was a teen, he was teaching his mother, Peg, about João Gilberto, Joni Mitchell, and Van Morrison. After Peg’s death, Frank opens his store in a small cluster of shops. Defying land developers and CD–pushing record reps, Frank eschews alphabetical and genre-based organizational systems in favor of delightfully placing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” ABC’s “The Lexicon of Love,” and Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” in the same bin—after all, each is a concept album. He’s a musical therapist, dosing heartache with Aretha Franklin and fussy babies with the Troggs. With his exuberant assistant manager, Kit, and fellow shopkeepers—including Maud, the tattoo artist; Mr. Novak, the baker; the Williams brothers, funeral directors; and Father Anthon, who has left the church to run a religious souvenir shop—Frank is part of a cozy, quirky community, well-insulated from the risks of falling in love…until Ilse Brauchmann faints in front of his store. Immediately smitten with each other, Ilse and Frank realize they are star-crossed when Ilse admits not only that she has a fiancé, but also—even worse—she doesn't listen to music. Yet she asks Frank to describe music to her; thus begins a journey into the emotional terrain charted by “The Moonlight Sonata,” “Ain’t it Funky Now, Parts 1 and 2,” and even “God Save the Queen,” the Sex Pistols’ version. Joyce (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, 2016, etc.) sets up a charming cast of characters, and her spirals into the sonic landscapes of brilliant musicians are delightful, casting a vivid backdrop for the quietly desperate romance between Frank and Ilse.
From nocturnes to punk, this musical romance is ripe for filming.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9668-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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