A quiet tale of love and vengeance.
A farm engulfs the lives of two women.
When their parents are killed in a car accident, 5-year-old Blanche and her 3-year-old brother, Gabriel, are taken in by their grandmother Émilienne and grow up on her farm, Paradise, in northern France. In a spare, somber family saga, award-winning poet and fiction writer Coulon traces the fortunes of the taciturn Émilienne, devoted to the land, and Blanche, “a warrior at five years old,” whose love of Paradise impels her to become “her grandmother’s shadow, casting aside her grief in favor of Émilienne’s robust self-discipline.” Walking before she could talk, the young Blanche seemed always “overflowing with movement, as if an older child were hidden inside her, waiting for the right moment to blossom.” That moment comes when she accedes to the attentions of her charming classmate Alexandre. Coulon’s poetic cadence and lyrical prose, ably served by translator Kover, give the tale the quality of a fable in which uncontrollable desires, nature’s capricious power, and violent anger and deceit erupt into a pitiless landscape. Coulon captures the visceral cruelty of farm life, where the stench of pigs’ blood lingers for days after the animals are slaughtered and entrails litter the soil. Everyone reveals an essential bestiality: Even Gabriel, a quiet, dreamy boy, grows into a man with “something of the animal about him, an animal sick with sadness and timidity.” Humans, like beasts, labor endlessly, “the industrious angels of this Paradise of mud and beaks and manure.” For the arduous challenges of farm work, brute strength is not “an option but a necessity.” Alexandre, though, determined to escape the harsh demands of the land and the claustrophobia of rural life, chooses to seek his fortune in the city—a decision that comes to ravage the lives of everyone in Paradise.
A quiet tale of love and vengeance.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60945-647-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
