Despite its contrivances, an important and suspenseful addition to post-9/11 literature.
An aging man loses his daughter and regains his wife, which strikes him as hardly a fair trade.
Jörgen, the sullen, irascible hero of this novel, is in late middle age and hitting the skids. He’s been forced into early retirement at the publisher where he’d edited unprofitable novels in translation, his two daughters are distant, and his estranged wife is insinuating herself back into his tidy Amsterdam home. A large investment of his vaporized after 9/11, and the book is something of an allegory about how post-terror anxiety undoes middle-class certainties and unlocks our latent violence. The plot centers on a graduation party for Jörgen’s eldest daughter, Tirza, who is planning a trip to Namibia with her boyfriend, who reminds Jorgen of Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker. Jörgen is suffering from the hectoring of his shallow, judgmental wife, and his daughters haven’t always shown shrewd judgment. (He caught his youngest daughter, Ibi, having sex with a tenant in his home when she was 15.) But it’s also clear that something is broken within Jörgen himself, and the closing pages clarify just how tragic the break is. The latter third of the novel is set in Namibia, where Tirza has fallen curiously silent, and during his search, he befriends an impoverished 9-year-old girl whose waiflike wanderings mirror his own. To his credit, Grunberg (The Jewish Messiah, 2008, etc.) convincingly renders this unlikely scenario, though the book never quite settles into either a character study or a cultural study. The author at times positions Jorgen as a thin archetype of contemporary racism and bourgeois rage, but the book is redeemed by the clarity of the prose and the intensity of its core mystery, leaving Tirza’s fate uncertain while her father’s becomes lamentably clear.
Despite its contrivances, an important and suspenseful addition to post-9/11 literature.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-934824-69-6
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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