No surprises in this story of slow, achingly anticipated self-discovery, but the journey is engaging.
Three episodes in a young woman’s life expose the parental pressures that shape her personality and the consequences as she moves into adulthood.
The long chain of cause and effect within families is exposed in all its subtle, cumulative force in Flemish author op de Beeck’s second novel, her first to be translated into English. Spanning some 25 years, it opens in 1976 with Mona, a 9-year-old middle-class girl, shut in the dark, a punishment inflicted by her strict mother, Agnes. But then Agnes dies in a car accident, and her withdrawn husband, Vincent, quickly remarries, delivering a needy, manipulative stepmother, Marie, to Mona and her young brother, Alexander. Sensitive Mona, constantly anxious not to disappoint or anger her parents, feels responsible for taking care of Alex and, later, her new half sister, Anne-Sophie—even, at times, Marie too. In the second section, Mona is 24, living independently and holding down a prestigious job in the theater. She has friends and a lover who’s an established writer, but people treat her poorly and she permits it, tolerating second-rate relationships rather than confronting them. The last section heralds change, as Vincent succumbs to a life-threatening illness and begins to open up to his daughter about his real affections, about Agnes’ abusive father, and about the circumstances of Mona’s birth. These revelations, and a stranger’s pointed advice—“We forget what we’re worth and don’t dare believe that we genuinely deserve something good”—help Mona to begin the process of change. It’s a simple, predictable scenario and a long one, but there are poignant moments, especially in the late scenes with Victor; and seeing boundaries finally being drawn brings perennial satisfaction.
No surprises in this story of slow, achingly anticipated self-discovery, but the journey is engaging.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0544-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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