An elegant novel about the ways pain can shape a man’s personality.
In Walsh’s debut novel, a Connecticut man survives the hell of war only to lead a lonely peacetime existence back home.
Joe DaSilva grows up in a small town on the banks of the Connecticut River, the son of a Portuguese waterman. He spends his childhood learning to tie knots from his father, getting into trouble with his best friend Bill Crawley, and pining after his childhood crush, Peggy. The week before high school graduation, Joe proposes to Peggy only to be rejected. The brokenhearted Joe quickly enlists in the Navy—there’s a war coming, after all—despite the reservations of his parents. With Bill in tow, Joe sails for Manila just in time to get attacked by the Japanese military (a wounded Bill is shipped to Australia before the coming Japanese invasion, but Joe stays behind and is captured when the Philippines fall). He somehow survives the Bataan Death March, a prison camp, malaria, and dysentery, but when he makes it back to Connecticut at war’s end, he’s a shell of his former self. Even worse, he learns that Peggy and Bill have become engaged in his absence. Resentful of his closest friends and wracked by post-traumatic stress, Joe settles into a stoic life as a mechanic. For the next 40 years, he’s content to repress his memories of the war—and all of his other grievances—until a new waitress takes a job at one of the local restaurants. Leigh Ann and her young daughter, Shelly, are new in town. Shelly spends her days alone at a vacant hotel while Leigh Ann works her shift, and Joe takes it upon himself to keep an eye on the child. As Joe inserts himself into their lives, he can’t help but allow them into his own. In the process, he’s finally forced to deal with the many ghosts of his past.
The author is a skilled storyteller with a knack for bringing scenes to vivid life, whether they depict a bucolic afternoon spent fishing on the river or a terrifying moment from the war: “He was barely able to rise to one knee the night the Japanese burst into camp. The first rifle butt to the back of his head folded the hemispheres of his brain in on each other. He lay there on his side, time out of body, eyes recording the scene like a camera knocked to the ground, still rolling.” The novel takes its time getting started, and the early chapters are burdened with an unfortunate sentimentality. From the point the war commences, however, Walsh weaves an immersive narrative that does not let up for the rest of the book. Even when the story treads into familiar territory—older Joe is reminiscent of any number of late-career Clint Eastwood film performances as a grump waiting to have his heart softened—the author is deft enough at characterization and plotting to keep the material from feeling stale. Those looking for a bighearted tale of PTSD and catharsis will find much to love in Joe’s story.
An elegant novel about the ways pain can shape a man’s personality.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781977261120
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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