Satire specializes in ugly characters, and this novel is overfilled with them, which proves an ungainly fit in the lighter...
A slapstick rendering of Pride and Prejudice also skewers high cultured academia and lowbrow reality TV.
In this modern version of an Austen marriage novel, four beautiful sisters (American, biracial and college educated) find themselves at the whim of their imperious mother. Forsythia Harcourt, originally from Jamaica, now living in Maryland and fantasizing about infiltrating the British throne, wants good marriages for her girls. Oldest Victoria is suspiciously unmarried, and Bliss is a huge disappointment—newly divorced from her college sweetheart (a lowly Latino revolutionary, no less!), she and daughter Bella have moved back home while she finishes her doctorate. Charlotte is in high school, so Forsythia can only depend on Diana, who does not disappoint. Diana is chosen to appear on The Virgin, in which men will compete to capture both her heart and hymen. Soon the Harcourt house is filled with a film crew: Sue, an overbearing network executive and her androgynous lackey, Punch; macho Dario, the show’s producer and director; and Wyatt, the handsome host. Diana and Forsythia are thrilled, Bliss and her father are mortified that Diana’s chastity will be auctioned for ratings, and Charlotte is furious at being ignored. But this is mostly background chatter for the real plot, which is discovering who will please the lovelorn, prickly Bliss. Her academic advisor Jordan McIntosh is dashing and recently widowed, but misread signals would be humiliating. Wyatt is great looking and considerate, but Bliss can never get him alone. And then there’s sexy Dario, whom Bella adores but Bliss can barely stomach. The show takes the whole family to Austria and England for the suitors to perform a series of ridiculous challenges, and minor dramas ensue, but the novel is mostly concerned with Bliss and her stubborn attempts to keep true love at bay.
Satire specializes in ugly characters, and this novel is overfilled with them, which proves an ungainly fit in the lighter realm of romance.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2382-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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