A predictable plot reveals emotional complexities.
A marriage falls apart in 1970s Montana.
Laura is angry. Her husband, Ed, a behavioral psychiatrist, has taken a position as superintendent of a mental institution in Boulder, Montana, forcing their move from Michigan, where she was pursuing her career as an artist. She is angry, too, because he works all the time; she feels ignored; and, worse, he is obsessed with one patient, Penelope, a beautiful, intelligent 16-year-old epileptic. Angry, jealous wife; workaholic, sexually voracious husband; tempting young woman: Reeves (Work Like Any Other, 2016) plays out this well-worn triangle in chapters that shift between Laura’s first-person narration and a third-person narration that's close to Ed's perspective, arriving at a twist that finally moves the novel beyond cliché to become a sensitive examination of love, responsibility, and compassion. Ed, who frequents prostitutes for “simple pleasures and anonymity,” is stereotypically self-absorbed. Laura espouses a familiar plaint, tearfully admitting to feeling “lonely and trapped and so angry and then so sad, and he couldn’t see that I was disappearing, that I needed him.” Struggling to define herself, she secretly takes a job at a clothing boutique; when she becomes pregnant, she keeps that a secret, too, for four months. “Why the hell did it take you so long to notice?” she asks angrily when Ed finally does notice, as they are having sex in a locked classroom at the hospital. Trying to make Laura feel validated, Ed convinces her to teach art to some patients—and against her objections insists that Penelope take the class. Predictably, the girl proves to be impressively talented, producing, Laura sees, “an artist’s sketch, as good as anything I could do,” and intensifying her jealousy. Ed, innovating a policy of deinstitutionalizing high-functioning patients, sends Penelope back to her disgruntled parents, precipitating a crisis that changes his life and her own. The biggest change, though, is Ed’s fate, forcing the man who has only observed suffering to find himself—and Laura—at its vortex.
A predictable plot reveals emotional complexities.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8350-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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