Standard romantic pabulum, but Alcott fans will find interesting tidbits to savor.
The title pretty much says it all about this first novel from McNees, an entry into the new subgenre that imagines the love life of spinster authoresses.
In her early 20s, Louisa moves to Walpole, N.H., for the summer with her financially strapped family: rigidly idealist father Bronson (portrayed with far more complexity in Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer-winning March), loving mother Marmee and sisters Anna, Lizzie and May, all obviously recognizable as the models for the Little Women characters. While Marmee hovers over frail Lizzie and spoils immature May, Anna and Louisa get to know the young people of the town. Conventional Anna falls in love with Nicholas Sutton, a wealthy young man who clearly reciprocates her feelings. Louisa, who already has literary aspirations, tries to resist her attraction to Joseph Singer, whose father runs the local dry-goods store and whose younger sister becomes May’s best friend. Louisa is as rude as possible to Joseph, but eventually his intelligence and sensitivity wear her down and the two share a kiss. But at a harvest dinner soon after, Mr. Sutton announces the engagement of Nicholas’s younger sister Nora to Joseph, an arrangement made by the fathers. Unfortunately, Joseph’s father is not only deathly ill but also on the brink of financial ruin, while heiress Nora requires a respectable fiancé to rehabilitate her tarnished reputation. Louisa is crushed, but she and Joseph rendezvous and make love. Nicholas dies in an accident; Anna leaves home to become a teacher; the Alcotts leave Walpole; and Louisa heads to Boston. She is despondent over a lack of publishing success when Joseph shows up. They make plans to run away, but then she receives word that The Saturday Evening Gazette has accepted her story, and she stands Joseph up at the station. Years later, now a famous author, she returns to Walpole to see him once again.
Standard romantic pabulum, but Alcott fans will find interesting tidbits to savor.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15652-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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