A serious subject cheapened by melodrama that rings inauthentic.
Greenwood’s earlier novels of family dysfunction (Rust and Stardust, 2018, etc.) have hooked onto issues ranging from anorexia to child abduction; here Down syndrome disrupts a young woman’s life and marriage.
In 1963, 22-year-olds Ginny and Ab, drawn together by their oh-so-sensitive appreciation of poetry, fall in love despite class differences—he’s a student at Amherst College; she’s a working-class “local girl." By 1969, stay-at-home mom Ginny is caring for their 4-year-old son, Peyton, in a wealthy suburb while Ab, who never wanted to be a lawyer, is toiling away in his father’s high-powered Boston firm. After the premature birth of their second child, Ginny holds her daughter, Lucy, only briefly before the doctor whisks the infant away, explaining she is “mongoloid” and unlikely to survive long. Once her tranquilizers wear off, Ginny learns Ab has followed his rigidly autocratic father’s dictate and removed Lucy to a state-run facility called Willowridge, coincidentally located just outside Amherst. Though distraught, she accepts Ab’s decision. What is most problematic in the novel is not Down syndrome as an issue but Ginny as a character. Her passive dependence (not even learning to drive), “willful ignorance” in accepting whatever conditions her husband’s family demands, and further “willful ignorance” of current events like Vietnam and feminism make her seem anachronistic. In 1971, when Ginny learns that Willowridge, where she’s never visited although her mother lives nearby, is under investigation for mistreating children, she finally goes to see Lucy. What begins as a legally permitted off-campus weekend stay spirals out of control into technical kidnapping when Ginny decides she cannot take fragile but increasingly alert Lucy back, Ab and his family be damned. Poor Ab is portrayed as a spineless wonder even when he succumbs to Ginny's miraculous new strength of will.
A serious subject cheapened by melodrama that rings inauthentic.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-16422-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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