Fans of Cameron's series will delight in this latest syrupy installment.
Bailey, an adorable malamute–Great Dane mix, finds his purpose in helping a young boy and his family navigate life’s tribulations.
Cameron (A Dog’s Way Home, 2017, etc.) offers the next in his series of books tracing the reincarnated souls of good dogs who go to heaven but are recalled to Earth as guardian angels of a sort for troubled children. Happily ensconced in dog paradise, filled with toys, sticks, and miles of shoreline to run, Bailey promises his previous owners to be a good dog again for another child. Of course, returning to the mortal realm as a puppy means that Bailey’s memories of his previous lifetimes will be erased—at least until he reunites with his beloved Ethan, his owner from the first book in Cameron’s series. Bailey (renamed Cooper) is given to a paraplegic boy named Burke, who trains him as a service dog. The work pays off when Burke can finally go to a real school, but soon enough, Burke’s family must take on the school district, which opposes having a dog in the classroom. Worse, the Trident Mechanical Harvesting Corporation’s drones have trespassed on the family’s land, prompting Burke’s father to shoot one with his rifle, thus risking a second lawsuit. On the homefront, Burke’s older brother, Grant, is having trouble accepting Burke’s disability. And on the romantic front, Bailey’s love for his soul mate, a boxer named Lacey, inspires both Burke and Grant to find true love, too. Told from Bailey’s perspective, Cameron’s tale reflects on human behaviors that confuse dogs, from the sad capture of Bailey, his mother, and siblings to his adoption by a loving family beset by companies threatening their land and eco-friendly farming practices. The effect is, unfortunately, more juvenile than deeply philosophical.
Fans of Cameron's series will delight in this latest syrupy installment.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-16351-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
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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