An impressively well-turned story about how environmental damage creeps into our bodies, psyches, and economies.
Big business, protesters, and working-class loggers clash in this environmentally savvy debut.
Davidson’s novel takes place in Northern California forest territory between 1977 and 1978, as Rich Gundersen, a fourth-generation logger, is poised to make a big profit: He’s just purchased a stretch of land full of old-growth redwoods whose sale could provide security for his family, which is smaller than he’d like; he and his wife, Colleen, have one son, Graham (nicknamed Chub), but as the story opens she’s just had another in a string of miscarriages. Other crises soon emerge. Anti-logging protesters are trying to halt work and are suspected of having left a child’s skull in the forest to prompt an investigation. Colleen, a midwife, witnesses an increase in stillbirths, many with serious deformations. Daniel, a researcher and Colleen’s ex-boyfriend, suspects chemicals sprayed by the timber company are responsible, but any delay to investigate threatens Rich’s plans to cut down and sell the redwoods. Davidson researched this milieu deeply but with an eye toward making every discovery feel natural and unforced. By shifting perspectives among Rich, Colleen, and Chub, she reveals not just the conflicts among loggers, protesters, and companies, but the growing stress within the family. The family of Colleen’s sister, Enid, whose husband is working an illicit tree-poaching scam, adds another layer of tension. (And Colleen can’t help but resent that Enid’s brood is ever growing: “Enid uncrosses her legs for two minutes and a baby pops out.”) As thoughtfully as Davidson establishes these dilemmas, she’s equally skilled at writing an outdoorsy adventure novel in which logging threatens the lives of workers with snapped cables and everybody else via landslides. Thematically, it’s a strong work of climate fiction, but it's rooted in age-old man-versus-nature storytelling.
An impressively well-turned story about how environmental damage creeps into our bodies, psyches, and economies.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982144-40-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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