A helicopter mom turns out to be no match for a well-funded conspiracy; engaging, with a likable young protagonist.
A sinister secret lies behind the pristine facade of an elite New Hampshire boarding school in this novel.
Welcome to Dunning Academy, where today’s best young minds and upper-crust legacies are molded into tomorrow’s movers and shakers—if the academic and social pressures don’t break them first. When 14-year-old Sam Webber received his acceptance, his mother, Hannah, was overjoyed. Sam was the miracle baby she and her husband, Edward, thought they would never have, and from the moment of his birth, he became the center of his mother’s life. Dunning was her idea—Sam would receive a superior education and make the important connections that would lead to a successful life. But now, he is on his own, insecure and struggling (“He realized something during those first weeks it would take his mother a long time to understand: the only way he was going to master Dunning Academy would be through a side door”). That door is provided by Justin Crandall, a legacy golden boy, who befriends Sam and offers him a chance to join The Nine, Dunning’s secret society (think Yale’s Skull and Bones for the high school set). Gradually, as he is pulled more deeply into The Nine’s web, Sam comes to realize that the society’s ostensibly harmless pranks are being manipulated by others with malevolent agendas. Woven throughout the disturbing, plot-driven narrative is a poignant mother-son drama, with Hannah’s obsessive commitment to Sam’s Ivy League track causing a fracturing in their relationship. In fluid prose, Blasberg (Eden, 2017) combines two tales through two alternating voices. The third-person narrator provides the major storyline, in which decades-old misdeeds are resurrected through current schemes and blackmail, while Hannah delivers the subplot through first-person, emotional recollections. While Sam is an appealing lead character, readers will likely find Hannah’s intransigence frustrating. But ultimately, she faces the fact that her own ambitions for Sam left him vulnerable to the machinations of more experienced players: “I used to take it for granted that our desires were intertwined. I assumed he’d absorbed them in utero, just as he shared my blood and my oxygen.”
A helicopter mom turns out to be no match for a well-funded conspiracy; engaging, with a likable young protagonist.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-674-9
Page Count: 325
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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