A sentimental parable about the power of motherhood, friendship, and love.
When a devoted single mom discovers she has ovarian cancer, her own health is the least of her worries. What will happen to her daughter?
Alice’s parents died before Zoe was born, and her brother, Paul, a practicing alcoholic, has not been much help. Raising her daughter alone has been tough but rewarding, and Alice even managed to start her own business helping the elderly with their daily activities. With no father figure in sight, Zoe has come to rely heavily on Alice, particularly since she began exhibiting signs of social anxiety disorder on the first day of kindergarten. Now 15, Zoe has only one friend at school. But Emily pushes Zoe to go on a double date, and Zoe’s panic attack leaves her utterly alone. Luckily for Zoe, a few new fans lurk in the wings, including a mysterious new school psychologist and Harry, the erstwhile football player who has suddenly begun paying attention to her. Meanwhile Alice has begun to realize the magnitude of her predicament, so she, too, needs help. Enter Kate and Sonja. Kate, Alice’s nurse, is recently married, having gained not only a loving husband, but also his son and daughter. Desperate to have a baby of her own, she’s on her third round of in vitro fertilization, but another miscarriage has her marriage on rocky terrain. Sonja, Alice’s social worker, has a seemingly perfect marriage to a psychologist, but Sonja is beginning to worry that her husband’s rough sexual behavior might actually amount to rape. Hepworth intertwines these women’s stories, taking the notion that it takes a village to raise a child another step: it takes a village to raise each woman up over her own tribulations. Saccharine at times, the tale’s threads knot up a bit too easily and implausibly.
A sentimental parable about the power of motherhood, friendship, and love.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-07775-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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