Black captures the nooks and crannies of Gus’ psyche, both self-aware and self-justifying, but doesn’t allow poor Owen space...
The first novel from short story writer Black (If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, 2010) tries to parse the intimacy, love, betrayals and resentments that comprise any long relationship.
From the first sentences, it's clear that narrator Gus (short for Augusta) is writing after her husband Owen’s death, although the novel covers his last months. Together since their 20s, painter Gus, now 47, and 51-year-old writer Owen didn't feel the need to marry until a few years ago, when the relationship was rocked by Gus’ brief affair—an affair she blames on her distress over Owen’s inability to father children. When the affair ended, she confessed all to Owen and they recommitted to each other. For the last two years, the couple, now legally joined, has lived in happy near isolation on a small farmstead somewhere outside Philadelphia. When middle-aged divorcée Alison moves in next door, she disrupts their Eden, already fraught with marital tension; despite her avowals of deep intimacy with Owen, Gus resents the fact that his writer’s block means she can't discuss her work with him and she obviously can’t mention the emails she’s been getting from a former art student who happens to be her ex-lover’s daughter. Drawing away from Owen, Gus spends increasing time with Alison, an aspiring painter whose husband abused her. The women discuss art, but Gus also starts confiding in Alison about Owen in ways that feel like a second betrayal. Then Alison’s daughter Nora shows up. Gus, whose own mother died when she was a small child, is jealous of their mother-daughter intimacy. She also senses that Nora, an aspiring writer who admires Owen’s books, is a sexual threat.
Black captures the nooks and crannies of Gus’ psyche, both self-aware and self-justifying, but doesn’t allow poor Owen space to breathe; her narrow focus, while often acutely insightful, makes for a claustrophobic reading experience.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6856-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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