Roche knows her way around the music business, but her story lacks focus or drama, and the Catholic uplift is discomfiting.
Singer/actress Roche offers a first novel about a burnt-out indie-rock star who is more connected than anyone thought to her small-town Catholic roots.
Mary Saint became famous for her edgy lyrics and outré performances, but her group Sliced Ham broke up several years ago after her band mate/best friend/lover Garbagio took a fatal dive off a hotel balcony and she went into rehab. Now sober, she lives in San Francisco with Thaddeus, a black transvestite who runs the God’s Kindness Church. Back in Swallow, N.Y., Mary’s mother Jean also lives alone since she moved her senile husband Bub into a nursing home. Devoutly Catholic Jean remains guilty that she didn’t defend Mary against Bub’s cruel, abusive behavior as a father. When Mary dropped out of high school and left Swallow after a particularly ugly scene, Jean cut Bub off emotionally. She rejected his tentative gestures to apologize or reconcile, but she feels more affection for him now that he is senile. After Garbagio’s mother moves into Bub’s facility, Jean develops a friendship with Garbagio’s father. Meanwhile, a local high-school English teacher who is a big Sliced Ham fan—and who sleeps with his student in a (comic?) plot digression that goes nowhere—approaches Jean about organizing a concert featuring Mary. Jean, a mix of prickly common sense and naïve provincialism, is excited to show off her successful daughter but nervous how the community will respond to Mary’s unconventional, irreverent style. Jean is also concerned about the ramifications of a claim Mary made in a letter about seeing the Virgin Mary when she was seven. In fact, Mary tells Thaddeus, who has his own horrific secret, that she writes her music for “the other Mary.” With Thaddeus’s help, Mary holds her concert in Swallow and afterwards gives her mother a bottle of holy water from Lourdes.
Roche knows her way around the music business, but her story lacks focus or drama, and the Catholic uplift is discomfiting.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4177-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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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