A classically styled novel that sounds a very contemporary alarm.
A seafaring saga takes a deep dive into uncharted waters.
Following a couple of well-received story collections, Rutherford makes an audacious leap as a novelist. Cadences that recall Melville or Coleridge are suffused with an environmentalist urgency and existential dread. The setup is relatively straightforward. In 1878 Massachusetts, during the waning days of the whaling industry, Arnold Lovejoy arrives in New Bedford with a letter for the Ashleys, the leading family of whaling. “As businesspeople they were ruthless,” Rutherford writes. “As whalers, they’d had no equal.” The letter says that one of their ships had been crushed by ice, and that its captain has chosen not to return. It turns out that the captain is the Ashleys' son-in-law, and that his wife, whom Lovejoy meets at the house, is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. He falls instantly in love. The Ashleys commission Lovejoy, a seafaring captain himself, to voyage in search of the lost ship and captain. Having long felt more at home at sea than on land, he complies. His mixed feelings about his mission are further complicated by the mysterious Edmund Thule, the family’s emissary, who might have a mission of his own. They embark on their voyage, with a ragtag crew including a couple of orphans, ages 10 and 12, whose rites of passage will increasingly become a focus of the novel. They are prey for a predatory crew member, in a novel that becomes increasingly focused on prey and predators. Lovejoy is an imperious commander, treating his crew as if he were their god, though sometimes feeling he is more like a whale. Is he a pawn of Thule’s? Is Thule a pawn of the Ashleys? Who is pulling the strings and to what end? Amid bad weather and considerable bloodshed, the voyage proceeds into the heart of oceanic darkness, where the true nature of the mission unfolds.
A classically styled novel that sounds a very contemporary alarm.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781646053582
Page Count: 386
Publisher: A Strange Object
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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