Ambitious, often impressive but structurally flawed work.
The road to hell is paved with a father’s good intentions.
Grodstein (Reproduction is the Flaw of Love, 2004, etc.) pushes some powerful emotional buttons in this tale of male mid-life angst, atavism and breakdown. Narrator Peter Dizinoff, a successful, occasionally dictatorial Jewish internist, has made good in exactly the way the American Dream promised his hard-working parents in Yonkers. He has a lovely home in New Jersey, a caring wife who has survived breast cancer, a thriving medical practice, good friends and a beloved son. Peter is proud of Alec and wants the best for his son, so he’s understandably disappointed when Alec turns rebellious, drops out of college and gets involved with the troubled daughter of Peter’s best friend Joe Stern. At 17, Laura Stern gave birth to a premature baby and abandoned it in a dumpster with a crushed skull. Acquitted of deliberate murder, she spent two years in a psychiatric facility and more than a decade away from home. Returning for a visit in 2006, this “polished, flirtatious” 31-year-old attracts the fascinated attention of considerably younger Alec. The novel doesn’t hurry to reveal how Peter comes, some time after this encounter, to be living alone above the garage of his house, rejected by his wife, Alec and Joe, forced to start a new medical practice in a poorer part of town. The twisting, occasionally confusing retrospective storyline is only the most notable of the author’s flaws in construction; direction and plotting are similarly problematic, especially the conclusion, with its pile-up of not quite plausible failures. Nonetheless, Grodstein’s wry insights, her fully imagined social panorama and her vision of a middle-class man at the crossroads testify to her considerable skill.
Ambitious, often impressive but structurally flawed work.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56512-916-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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