A consuming work of profound poetical depth and moral power.
In Weaver’s historical novel, a Norwegian farm girl in North Dakota is assaulted by a prominent man, placing the family in a grimly precarious position.
In 1906, Karl Haugen, a low-ranking farmhand working for a despotic family in Norway, flees in the dead of night with his family to America. They settle in Skye, North Dakota, but Karl dies in 1925, and his wife, Petra, follows him to the grave shortly thereafter, leaving their four children—Emil, Dagmar, Sally, and Jenny—to fend for themselves on the family farm. In 1933, when Sally is only 17 years old, she is raped by the town doctor, Robert McConnell, while sedated during a medical procedure. She’s slow to tell anyone, especially Emil, now the head of the family and prone to mercurial violence, since she believes no one will take her word over the doctor’s. However, she becomes pregnant from the assault, making the secret impossible to keep. Emil leaves the baby girl that results with an unsuspecting family on a train and begins to plot a ghastly revenge upon McConnell, one as inventive as it is macabre, mesmerizingly depicted by the author (“The slimmest of trimming would make the boot rub slightly. Rub slowly. Over time”). The stoic Haugens are an unforgettable family; it seems impossible they could blend in well anywhere in the world. The author paints a bracingly unsentimental view of their toughness—Jenny draws this astonishing conclusion after the family weathers some terrible losses: “You’re never going to go soft on the world.” Weaver’s prose is beguiling, achieving a mercilessly spare poetry (“Ahead, a field mouse hung on a barb. A gray, masked bird sat nearby, a shrike, a bird who killed its own kind”) that perfectly matches the only kind of love of which the Haugens are capable: quietly inexpressive but also inexhaustible. This is an impressive literary achievement, a genuinely moving novel without a single line of treacly kitsch.
A consuming work of profound poetical depth and moral power.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781960250995
Page Count: 390
Publisher: CalumetEditions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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