Readers who are averse to crying in public be warned: You’ll want to sit with this astounding story at home.
A single mother navigates custody of her granddaughter—and tries to correct mistakes she made the first time around—in this gentle but heart-wrenching story.
When London schoolteacher Ruth learns that her daughter, Eleanor, is pregnant, the two are sharing a meager Christmas dinner on a park bench. Eleanor is years into debilitating addiction, living on and off the streets with her baby's father, Ben, but Ruth pushes past Eleanor's resistance to offer help when Lily is born—holding vigil as the newborn goes through withdrawal in the hospital, taking control of the baptism as Eleanor and Ben keep wandering off, regularly stopping by their apartment to make sure they’re eating. When Ruth finds an unresponsive person in Eleanor’s apartment—ostensibly an overdose—she flees with Lily, anticipating a fight for custody that never comes. The years pass swiftly, almost perfunctorily, as Lily grows into a kind, strong-willed, and precocious child, “someone who knows life is a serious business, perhaps a few years before she might,” as Ruth's friend describes her. The pacing matches Ruth’s own matter-of-factness: Her outsize shame leaves little berth for wallowing, and her self-deprecating wit resists maudlin sentimentality. (The greatest source of comic relief comes from Jean Reynolds, Ruth’s co-worker, whose brashness and loyalty make her impossible not to love.) Through intimate first-person narration, Ruth balances the pain of losing a daughter against the hope of a second chance. Her relationship with Lily brings a cautious joy. Ruth can’t look at the girl without seeing the trail of maternal pain that originated with her own mother, who drank disinfectant after Ruth’s father left, and led to Lily’s miraculous birth. Love can go awry—see the double meaning of the title, which Lily discovers on a tombstone: “It kind of sounds like the person tried to be loving but…the aim was wrong”—but can that misdirection be righted? Though Lily isn’t immune from trauma—this is clear when her perspective abruptly takes over in the final third of the book—she is propped up by the strength of Ruth’s devotion.
Readers who are averse to crying in public be warned: You’ll want to sit with this astounding story at home.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377810
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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