Mysterious and bleak, atmospheric and creepy—but, ironically, the novel lacks soul.
Years after a disturbing incident changes his life, a man finally tells the story of what happened to him and his brother in Hurley’s tension-filled debut.
Growing up with a strict Catholic mother, the two boys learn a version of fire-and-brimstone faith that is tested each year when the family and some other members of the church, including the local priest, travel to the remote Lancashire coast around Easter. The older boy, Hanny, has mental disabilities and refuses to talk, and his younger brother, the narrator, is one of the few who can communicate with him and who looks out for him, accepting him for who he is. Their mother hopes for a miracle every year that will “cure” Hanny, and she forces the whole group to fast and pray in hopes that he will begin to speak. Their last journey to the coast, when the boys are in their mid- and late teens, coincides with the death of the old priest and the hiring of a young, new one. At the Easter in question, the group is met by unfriendly locals, and soon they are hearing and seeing strange things in the woods, compounded by the arrival of a glamorous, mysterious family in the “big house” that lies beyond the Loney, a stretch of beach that sits underwater during high tides. The unforgiving landscape is a major point of the novel; its danger and isolation not only endanger the boys, but also emphasize the sense of dread that permeates every page. The weakness of the novel is the narrative voice: the narrator, speaking in flashback, describes the loneliness and horror very clearly, but the reader never gets a good sense of who he is.
Mysterious and bleak, atmospheric and creepy—but, ironically, the novel lacks soul.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-74652-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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