Lovely writing wrapped around an often unpalatable core.
A family in a remote lighthouse comes under the spell of an unusual woman and her even more unusual daughter.
The Borya brothers are young when the five of them, and their impoverished parents, move from their shack near a fishing village to take over an isolated lighthouse. Eventually, Osip, a middle brother, becomes the lighthouse keeper; Sevastian-Benedikt, the oldest, hunts and traps to keep them alive. As time passes and a tragedy reduces their number, Sevastian takes up with Noé, a strange woman who lives in a small cabin apart from the rest of the family. Though Noé is Sevastian’s woman and bears him a number of children who run wild through the rugged landscape where they live, Osip is nevertheless obsessed with her, and the two begin sleeping together. Noé rarely speaks, and she has little to do with the children she births. She knows the land and the animals intimately: She can skin whales, handle jellyfish. Noé and Sevastian’s daughter, Mie, has a similar talent, able to cast her mind into the bodies of other creatures (and sometimes inanimate objects) to fuse her consciousness with animals and explore the world. At 12, Mie now wants to understand humans better and turns her attention toward what seems most natural: sex. This is Wilhelmy’s third novel, though the first to be translated into English, and she is a meticulous recorder of the dramatic wilderness of what seems to be coastal Quebec. But her desire to show readers how, left to their own devices, humans will behave in the amoral ways that nature produces in the animal kingdom seems to betray a deep cynicism. And Wilhelmy’s detached look at incest and child sexuality may leave many readers cold.
Lovely writing wrapped around an often unpalatable core.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4870-0610-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Arachnide/House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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
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