A fecund and contemplative feminist family saga.
A woman returning to her native Vermont to locate her missing mother uncovers a submerged family history.
The debut novel by MacArthur (Half Wild: Stories, 2016) opens in 2011, as the remnants of Hurricane Irene besiege a rural Vermont town. Bonnie, a heroin addict, has disappeared during the flooding, prompting her daughter, Vale, to leave New Orleans, where she makes ends meet tending bar and stripping, to help find her. With few trails to follow, though, she mainly spends the ensuing months reconnecting with her extended family and locals, particularly her great-aunt Hazel, whose grip on reality is slipping, and her aunt Deb, a one-time commune dweller who still proudly adheres to a back-to-the-land lifestyle. (The novel’s cultural touchstones are feminist and activist icons like Henry David Thoreau, Grace Paley, Frantz Fanon, and Patti Smith.) MacArthur alternates narrators, shifting not just from Vale to Hazel to Deb, but to notebooks written by Vale’s proto-hippie maternal grandmother, Lena, giving the narrative a lyrical, earth-mother vibe. As Vale chats up family, reads the notebooks, and pulls up archives to seek evidence of her Native American heritage, MacArthur’s theme is clear: the various ways women struggle to get past abuse and disrespect. (Vale’s discovery of an infidelity in the past adds another layer of complication.) The family tree can get tangled, a love-interest subplot delivers little heat, and the story is occasionally pockmarked with only-in-a-novel dialogue and actions (“Find me!” Vale cries after flinging her clothes off in a rainstorm). But MacArthur ably sustains multiple narrative threads and voices while sympathetically exploring more than four generations’ worth of hard times. And though the story is somber, there’s enough room in the narrative for a sliver of optimism. As Deb tells Vale, “No radical change comes during good times.”
A fecund and contemplative feminist family saga.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-244442-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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