As usual, it’s hard to tell from moment to moment which disturbances in Smith’s universe (Bertie’s Guide to Life and...
More comings and goings at 44 Scotland St. and in its charming Edinburgh environs.
The main going is ongoing: the continued absence of Bertie Pollock’s basilisk of a mother, Irene, who’s been detained indefinitely in a Persian Gulf harem, where she’s organized a book group while she waits for the diplomats to sort out her return. Stuart Pollock may be a dab hand at statistics, but he’s not up to the task of managing Bertie, who’s just turned 7, or his infant brother, Ulysses, on his own. So he calls his own mother, Nicola Tavares de Lumiares, who leaves her husband behind in Portugal and flies to her son’s side, to the deep gratification of everyone, especially Bertie. Outside town, gallery owner Matthew Harmony, his wife, Elspeth, and their triplets are still settling into an old farmhouse Matthew’s bought from the Duke of Johannesburg, who’s constantly afraid that his right to his title will be exposed by the self-appointed authorities of the peerage, when Matthew discovers a secret room hidden behind a bookcase. Matthew’s assistant and former girlfriend, Pat McGregor, is so worried that Anichka, the young Czech woman who’s engaged to her psychiatrist father, is a gold digger that she contemplates desperate measures: throwing her own ex-boyfriend, irresistibly handsome narcissist Bruce Anderson, into Anichka’s path to test her motives and perhaps derail her schemes. Only portrait painter Angus Lordie and his bride, anthropologist Domenica Macdonald, seem to be moving forward on an even keel—so there’s little to say about them until Angus has a touching epiphany and composes a poem whose heartfelt spirits are perhaps a bit loftier than the actual proceedings.
As usual, it’s hard to tell from moment to moment which disturbances in Smith’s universe (Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers, 2015, etc.) will pass after a momentary frisson and which will lead to serious ethical dilemmas. A bit like life, when you think about it.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-97191-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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