Overwritten, lugubrious and self-consciously oblique.
Kimmel (The Used World, 2007, etc.) tells the story of an unbalanced Indiana college girl who may have been abused in childhood.
The novel’s first sentence, “I never had sex with my father but I would have, if he had agreed,” sets the tone. Trace Pennington, who goes to college under the name Ianthe Covington, drops a seminar on “the wounded woman.” It’s a good label for the burgeoning genre of novels like Kimmel’s about brilliant, beautiful, abused females. Trace is certainly the classic “wounded woman” heroine: She’s poor; she’s goth lovely with striking eyes; she keeps a dream journal; she lives in an abandoned farmhouse; and she’s first in her class. Oh, and she may be insane. Trace shares her sordid past in bits and pieces along with large helpings of psychological theorizing heavy on Freud, Jung and James Hillman but also ranging from Greek mythology to Carl Sagan. Occasionally Trace sneaks back to her hometown to visit her friend Candy, who lives in a broken-down trailer with her kids. Candy confides she’s been visited by aliens—the same way Trace may have been as a child; one night she was found wandering outside in the woods by her house. Trace sometimes explains her wandering as the aftermath of an encounter with aliens. She also claims to have been tortured by members of her mother’s church as part of an exorcism ceremony. The youngest of three children, Trace clearly considers her mother cruel and abusive, her father a broken saint. In her final year in college, Trace becomes passionately involved with Jacob, a psychology professor who marries her and molds her into a proper faculty wife. Although Trace isn’t sure whether Jacob, whose first wife disappeared, is a Pygmalion or a Bluebeard in her life, readers will suspect that he is just a pretentious jerk. After a stay in the hospital Trace begins to put the jigsaw pieces of her past into some kind of order. Or not.
Overwritten, lugubrious and self-consciously oblique.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7284-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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