A readable, recognizable, tragicomic account of coping with domestic disaster.
A middle-aged woman’s life comes undone with the revelation that her marriage is over.
As boring wives go, Diane Delaunais is not so much. A woman with a taste for stylish boots, she is also not shy about confronting those who upset her, from a finicky neighbor to a busybody secretary spreading lies. Nevertheless, 48-year-old Diane is a familiar figure—the long-serving partner who, after 25 years of marriage and three children, suddenly finds herself replaced by a younger model. Now, with her husband Jacques’ revelation that her solid life was in fact built on foolish assumptions, she’s taking a more sardonic view of marriage vows. Maybe they should be rewritten: “I solemnly swear to love you, blah blah blah, until I stop loving you. Or until I fall for someone else.” Quebec novelist Lavoie (Mister Roger and Me, 2010) brings a bracing, comic edge to this well-worn storyline but doesn’t avoid the predictabilities of the genre. Propped up by a therapist, her children, and her BFF Claudine (another abandoned wife), Diane goes through a recognizable range of emotions—numbness, grief, anger, acceptance. She buys new running gear and gets drunk a few times. She has a flirtation with an attractive work colleague, takes a crowbar to the furniture, adopts a three-legged cat, and makes some surprising new acquaintances. Among the ups and downs and comic set pieces, Diane must mark the major milestones of a forsaken woman’s life: reassessing the past and making the best of the future. Lavoie keeps her novel short, offering chaotic humor and snappy observation to balance the pain and loss. Diane will emerge from her crisis, spirited, open-hearted, and among friends. She will survive.
A readable, recognizable, tragicomic account of coping with domestic disaster.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4870-0461-3
Page Count: 280
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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