A coming-of-age story overloaded with tragedy, hopelessness, and trauma.
Bernhard’s debut centers on the ugly cards fate deals to adolescent boy Wes Ballot: poverty, alcoholism, rape, incest, abuse, and abandonment, to name a few.
Living with the pain caused by other people in pain, the protagonist has a resilience that's almost beyond belief—really, it is hard to believe. The novel opens with 15-year-old Wes’ “ear to the ice, alone on a frozen lake surrounded by remote miles of woods and farmland...where the ice had given way and the hungry lake had swallowed [his] mother whole.” The utter bleakness of this initial scene aptly sets the tone for the remainder of the book and showcases one of the author’s most commendable skills: visceral descriptions of the frigid winters in rural Minnesota. Abandoned by his drifter father, Wes ends up in Loma living with Gip and Ruby, his maternal grandparents. The two are a sad and vile pair who blame their grandson for his mother’s death. When Wes asks if God allowed his mother to die, Ruby responds heartlessly: “God wasn’t there, Wes….You were.” Against this emotional backdrop and with no supportive authority to guide him, Wes somehow attends high school, holds a summer job, and falls in love. Bernhard shows that she is not afraid of difficult or touchy subjects, illustrating the prevalence of classism and racism in the lives of the inhabitants of her fictional small town, but she doesn't go beyond the surface in her exploration of systematic prejudice. The problems, like the characters, are underdeveloped. As the novel progresses, Wes uncovers repressed family secrets so horrendous that the reader might find some passages difficult to read.
A coming-of-age story overloaded with tragedy, hopelessness, and trauma.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0298-5
Page Count: 351
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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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