Readers with a soft spot for lovable, saintly freaks may overlook the simplistic characterizations and manufactured plot.
Debut novelist Baker attempts a contemporary fable about an epically proportioned young woman searching for love and acceptance in her upstate New York hometown.
After her mother dies giving birth to her, Truly Plaice grows up with petite sister Serena Jane under their father’s care until his death when Truly is 12. The snobbish minister’s wife takes in conventionally pretty Serena, while freakishly large Truly ends up on the Dyersons’ hardscrabble farm. She finds a friend in Amelia Dyerson, whose poverty and learning disabilities make her an outsider like Truly, and in Marcus Thompson, another misfit because he’s so smart. Popular Serena seems the lucky one, until doctor’s son Bob Bob date rapes and impregnates her. They marry and head to Buffalo where they remain for eight years while Bob Bob morphs into Dr. Robert Morgan IV. Shortly after their return to Aberdeen with seven-year-old Bobbie, Serena runs off. Robert and Amelia are called to identify her dead body in a nearby town. Truly, growing larger by the day, agrees to move in with Robert to help raise sweetly effeminate Bobbie. It’s a pituitary gland problem that’s causing Truly’s perpetual enlargement, declares Robert, who begins secretly treating her. Meanwhile she comes across a quilt into which Robert’s great-great-grandmother stitched herbal, perhaps magical cures not long after the Civil War. Soon Truly is concocting her own brews and facing life-or-death choices, as the remedies can both cure and kill. Despite a few missteps, she finds ultimate redemption, complete with weight loss and marriage. It is probably no coincidence that Aberdeen County has a Celtic ring, since despite a few contemporary reference points (Vietnam, gays) it has an out-of-time, Brigadoon atmosphere.
Readers with a soft spot for lovable, saintly freaks may overlook the simplistic characterizations and manufactured plot.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-19420-4
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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