Not much happens—there’s just enough incident for a substantial short story—but Brown has a great ear for the way children...
Brown follows the durable Hunsenmeir sisters (Loose Lips, 1999, etc.) to the seashore, where the younger generation carries on the aimless, benign, revelatory quarreling of their midlife elders.
Louise (Wheezie) is the Catholic one. Julia (Juts), the Lutheran, is still free-spirited enough to get under her more authoritarian sister’s skin. And that skin has been especially tender since Wheezie’s daughter Ginny died of cancer in 1947, leaving Wheezie and her husband Pearlie, the painting contractor, to help their son-in-law Ken, a hero of Okinawa still weeping for his late wife, raise their grandson Leroy. Five years later, when the boy is eight, the two sisters pack him and Juts’s adopted daughter Nickel, seven, into a car and take them down to St. Mary’s, Md., where the family’s ancestors landed in America, as Wheezie constantly reminds everyone, in 1634. The two sisters reminisce about the misadventures fat Aunt Doney had the day her bathing suit uncontrollably shrank and bat putdowns back and forth like veteran tennis players just looking to keep the ball in play. Nickel, who tells the story, observes every nuance of these volleys, sometimes adding her own precocious judgments: “It was good to see Aunt Louise laugh.” In between times, she needles her cousin with barbs about his private parts, his fear of crabs and his limitations as a hard worker, and trades insulting epithets only slightly less veiled than those of her mother and aunt. Despite constant disagreements among most of the four characters, the prevailing tone is tranquil, as if a storm had recently blown itself out.
Not much happens—there’s just enough incident for a substantial short story—but Brown has a great ear for the way children argue, and a keen eye for the way their childish arguments shade off into the defining conflicts of a lifetime.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1870-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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