Humane and lovely; reminiscent of Paul Harding’s Tinkers in its sympathetic understanding of mental disability and the power...
Entering his sixth decade, a faithful son recounts a decidedly unusual childhood.
It is gone now, disappeared somewhere along the way, the orange crate that crossed the China Sea on a freighter and wound up in an asylum in Norway. Recalls the narrator of events of half a century past, “Papa had found the crate in the attic above the men’s unit, along with old sedan chairs, straitjacket beds, and other paraphernalia from the past.” Our narrator slept in the crate as a baby; in a dream, his dead sister floats in it across the water, “holding white carnations,” and now it is gone, as are all the years gone by. Heivoll (Before I Burn, 2014) takes a Proustian view of the passage of time mixed with a solemnity befitting Ingmar Bergman, though he writes economically and with characters of a kind that do not often figure in storytelling: the mentally disabled, eight of whom are the charges of the narrator’s parents, churchly people with great reservoirs of empathy. Tracing this history to the last days of the Nazi occupation of Norway, Heivoll revisits tiny, rare moments of happiness (“I shivered and splashed with my hands, water sprayed up around us; sunbeams glistened in the drops and we laughed and laughed, and there was nothing but our laughter to be heard”), moments that produce nothing but wistfulness in those who partake in recalling them. His characters have a tragic grace, such as one, a promising poet whose mother burned his manuscript, another a voracious reader and gifted singer; all are fully fleshed, if not suited to the world, as when two sisters, having inherited a small sum, fail to comprehend how a bank account works. This is a story built on vignettes and small episodes; not much happens, but the brush strokes quickly make an elegant portrait.
Humane and lovely; reminiscent of Paul Harding’s Tinkers in its sympathetic understanding of mental disability and the power of memory.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-784-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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