Vintage Norman, though not as good as The Bird Artist (1994) or The Museum Guard (1998).
A fledgling artist’s attempts to give design and coherence to his personal life are the subject of this appealing if odd sixth novel from the free-range Vermont author.
What we first learn of protagonist David Kozol is that he had, during his London honeymoon, been found—by his new father-in-law William Field—in a hotel room with another woman. This resulted in a scuffle during which William was struck by a taxi and severely injured. The novel then shifts forward and backward, depicting David’s developing fascination with disturbingly unconventional Czech photographer Josef Sudek, his soaringly romantic chance meeting with Maggie Field (publicist for a traveling chamber orchestra) and the impulsive marriage that brought David (a Vancouver native) to Nova Scotia and the rural estate of its absentee owners (Holocaust survivors) Isador and Stefania Tecosky, where William caretakes and acts as guardian to a flock of (rather intemperate) swans. Following William’s “accident,” David becomes the caretaker for both the estate and William, maintaining a wary détente with the aggrieved older man—who eventually makes good on his repeated promise, “I’ll knock your lights out.” David is an appealing, credible, flawed young man (William thinks he’s a “man who doesn’t have the slightest notion of how to handle life”). The novel is also flawed, however, by overabundant exposition and occasionally awkward shifts from present- to past-tense narration. But it’s filled with engaging characters (the voluble charmer Maggie, sharp-witted local veterinarian Naomi Bloor, inept burglar Tobias Knox) and oddball details and incidents (e.g., a house-trashing perpetrated by “pissed-off swans”). And the swans are a teasing complex image—of beauty, fidelity, mystery, the souls we like to think we possess and the kind of fragility that invites violation.
Vintage Norman, though not as good as The Bird Artist (1994) or The Museum Guard (1998).Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-73541-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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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