A troubled protagonist, beset by disaster and malefaction, is touched by magic as he develops new emotional connections.
After losing his wife and unborn son in a tsunami in Australia, an expat horse trainer adopts a psychic 3-year-old.
As Mitchard’s (Second Nature: A Love Story, 2011, etc.) latest novel opens, a killer wave hits Brisbane. Among the victims are ex-cop Frank Mercy’s pregnant wife and almost her entire extended family. Dazed and grief-stricken, Frank joins the volunteer rescue efforts the next day, coming to the aid of a woman and two small boys in a van that is half underwater. He plucks out the littler child, but before he can get to the others, the vehicle is swept away. When the devastated Frank returns to his family’s horse farm in Wisconsin a few weeks later, he takes the components of an unexpected new life: the boy (whom he has not bothered to legally adopt), a huge horse named Glory Bee, and a young Irish groom. By this time he's learned that the boy he named Ian, who rarely speaks, has a telepathic gift—he can enter the minds of enraged people and make them calm down and be nice. Animals, too, as Frank sees when they descend into the cargo hold of their international flight, where Glory Bee and other zoo and domestic animals are going wild from the turbulent ride. “The boy had to jump back after the first time he touched Glory Bee’s leg through the…wooden slats of the makeshift stall.…She was roaring, cantering in place. But the second time Ian touched her, she stopped, and if she were a woman, Frank believed he would have seen her stand there, sobbing.” Frank recognizes the possibility that Ian’s power could easily be used for evil—and soon enough, it becomes clear that very bad people are hunting him down, murdering those who get in their way. Meanwhile, Frank meets another woman, an equestrian psychiatrist who asks him to train her and her horse for the Olympics. As his heart begins to heal, he faces the challenge of protecting Ian from the mounting threat.
A troubled protagonist, beset by disaster and malefaction, is touched by magic as he develops new emotional connections.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1557-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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