Despite some soap-opera machinations and occasional literary overreach, the novel will strike a responsive chord in any...
A debut novel that delves so deeply into the small-town heartland that readers will accept its flaws as part of its charm.
“Write what you know” is the first dictum directed toward aspiring fiction writers, and there’s no doubt that Butler knows his fictional Little Wing inside out. It’s a Wisconsin farm town not far from Eau Claire, where the author was raised, and it holds a central place in the hearts of those who came of age there—particularly the four men who were boyhood friends and who narrate the novel’s alternating chapters, along with the fifth, a woman who was the childhood sweetheart of at least two of them. Beth and Henry are the married couple who remained to farm in Little Wing and, despite their financial struggles, are in some ways the envy of the others. Lee, who is Henry’s best friend, has become “America’s most famous flannel-wearing indie troubadour,” an artist so successful he hobnobs with those that others know mainly from celebrity magazines. But he only feels at home in Little Wing, where he found his voice and wrote the songs on the album that catapulted him to fame (and gives the novel its title). Kip made millions for others and did well for himself as a broker in Chicago but has returned to Little Wing to restore its mill as a commercial center and to show off the beautiful woman who will be his wife. Ronny left town as a rodeo rider and an alcoholic and has returned to recover after a brain-damaging mishap. There are four weddings in the novel, a few separations, a bunch of drunken adventures and confessions, and a fairly preposterous ending. But there is also a profound empathy for the characters and the small-town dynamic that the reader will likely share, an appreciation for what “America was, or could be.”
Despite some soap-opera machinations and occasional literary overreach, the novel will strike a responsive chord in any reader who has found his life reflected in a Bob Seger song.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03981-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
PROFILES
IN THE NEWS
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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