Marley and Me combined with Tuesdays with Morrie.
From humor columnist Cameron (8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter, 2008, etc.), a first novel that follows the spiritual journey of a dog through four incarnations.
“Toby” is first born in a litter of four to a mother who lives in the wild away from humans. But soon the family is captured. Although his mother wants only to escape, Toby—who understands human language as soon as he hears it—is immediately drawn to the human kindness of the woman who has made it her mission to care for strays. Unfortunately her facility is already overcrowded when a vicious new dog arrives. Injured in a fight among the dogs, Toby ends up in a pound where he is put down, but not before he’s begun to wonder what his purpose in life might be. He is reborn as “Bailey,” a golden retriever who becomes the beloved pet of “the boy” named Ethan. Ethan lives with his parents in town but spends summers on his grandparents’ farm, where both Ethan and Bailey form a special bond with a little girl named Hannah. When Ethan is a teenager, a jealous, frankly evil schoolmate burns down Ethan’s house. Bailey helps the police catch the perpetrator, but Ethan is badly injured, physically and emotionally. He and Bailey spend his senior year recuperating at his grandparents’ farm as his parents’ marriage disintegrates. By now Bailey has realized that his purpose is to comfort Ethan. Ethan goes off to college and eventually Bailey dies of old age to be reborn as Ellie, a female dog who becomes the star of a K-9 unit until she loses her sense of smell. Although her owners love her, she never forgets her special bond with Ethan. So when Toby/Bailey/Ellie is reborn, male again, he searches until he finds Ethan, now a lonely old man living on the family farm. Soon Ethan adopts “Buddy,” who reunites Ethan with his lost love Hannah.
Marley and Me combined with Tuesdays with Morrie.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2626-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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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