A serious subject, treated respectfully, but William’s search for faith continues to seem prompted more by plot than...
A first novel energetically if unconvincingly details the tragic consequences of a man seeking to find God on a journey that embraces different faiths in distant countries.
New Zealander Johnson vividly renders varied places—New Zealand, Australia, Utah, Illinois, and Canada—from 1880 to 1920. In a prologue, ten-year-old William McQuiggin is severely beaten by his father, a judge in Auckland, but the incident doesn’t help explain what William later does and becomes. The story moves to 1898, when William, now married to Myra, has a vision of God one night on the land he’s supposed to be clearing for his father. But in spite of the vision, he still drinks, keeps a still, and, except for frequent demands for sex, ignores Myra, whose first baby has just died. William hates working the land, and one night he sets fire to the house and heads back to Auckland, leaving newly pregnant Mrya to manage on her own. Myra, who through all her travails remains sexually attracted to William, is taken in by the McQuiggin household, where she bears twins. William, meanwhile, having met some Mormon missionaries, heads off to Utah. When Mormonism fails him, he moves to Illinois, and, taken with Dr. Dowie, a charismatic preacher, lives in the community Dowie forms. There, he’s soon joined by Myra, who bears him more children, but William’s old demons—liquor, violence, other women—still haunt him, and a fearful Myra flees with the children to Vancouver. William finds her, and, as usual, she lets herself be seduced by him, though he is increasingly delusional and his religious fervor brings about the death of one of the children. The family returns to Auckland, where William’s search for God will become even more dangerous.
A serious subject, treated respectfully, but William’s search for faith continues to seem prompted more by plot than character.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-29110-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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