Moore’s readers may find this book cuts a little too close to home.
The members of a high-achieving Marin County family face their fears: applying to college, blowing a deal, revealing their secrets.
It’s a tense year for the Hawthornes. Nora, a real estate agent, is trying to get past a dry spell by finding a buyer for the Watkins house, which the current owners insist on pricing slightly too high at $8.8 million. Gabe, a consultant, is trying to avoid his firm’s overconfident new intern, who seems to think she has something on him. (Spoiler alert: she does, and it won’t take long to figure out what it is.) Oldest daughter Angela, the class valedictorian, is applying to college—one college only: her father’s alma mater, Harvard—and popping pills to keep up with her homework and extracurricular commitments. Middle daughter Cecily has always been the happy child, excelling at the offbeat activity of Irish dance, but something seems to be troubling her. And youngest daughter Maya, who’s in second grade, still doesn’t know how to read; Nora secretly worries that it’s her fault, since Maya fell on her head as a baby while her mother was busy on a work call. Each chapter is told from a different character’s viewpoint, but perhaps because women like Nora are the book’s target audience, it’s she who really comes alive—and it’s her tension that permeates the book. Nora’s brain is always running through to-do lists, and her anxiety is contagious. Not pleasant anxiety, the kind you feel when you’re reading a Stephen King novel. The unpleasant kind you feel in your own life when you have too much to do and too little time to get it done. She spends two pages, on and off, thinking about the dishwasher—how it’s still running, how she could have hand-washed the dishes faster, how she finally unloaded it. Moore (So Far Away, 2012, etc.), has an excellent eye for the minutiae of upper-middle-class life, but it gets exhausting immersing yourself in another family’s worries on top of your own.
Moore’s readers may find this book cuts a little too close to home.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-54004-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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 deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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