A debut novel that offers a slightly unsettling look into the lives of two women who are just beginning to understand one...
Roche’s first novel has the quirkiness one would expect from a singer in a group whose fans consider them to be down-to-earth music royalty.
The Saints in the title refer to daughter Mary and mother Jean, who live both miles and worlds apart. Mary skipped out from under her abusive father’s thumb when she was a teenager, leaving behind Swallow, N.Y., where she felt stifled and repressed. Later, the mother who failed to protect either her daughter or herself from Bub’s attacks puts her failing husband in a nursing home and moves to a new place, but she and Mary have not seen one another in years. Now Mary’s career as an alternative rocker with hits like “Sewer Flower” and “Feet and Knuckles” to her credit is over, dying along with her lover, Garbagio. She’s landed in San Francisco with an endearing and practical black transvestite named Thaddeus, a bedraggled dog and a fear that people will recognize her and see the failure in her eyes. Jean, on the other hand, remains in Swallow, troubled by a request from a high-school teacher who wants to bring Mary back to play a concert at the high school where she was miserable. To everyone’s astonishment, Mary agrees to do the concert for a ridiculous amount, and her impending trip causes ripples that turn into waves in everyone’s lives. Roche, who knows a thing or two about word slinging, writes with a fine ear, attuned to the rhythm of the language. Although the characters are off-kilter enough to be interesting and compelling enough to be sympathetic, there is, alas, lots of filler in the form of some of the minor characters, like the pedophilic teacher who brings Mary back to town. Like extra verses of a song that no one ever bothers to sing, Roche’s book stretches to add details that are neither important nor very interesting.
A debut novel that offers a slightly unsettling look into the lives of two women who are just beginning to understand one another.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4177-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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