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
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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