Book Review: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

C'est très belle, n'est-ce pas?

"If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are."

These are the opening lines to Kristin Hannah's new novel, The Nightingale, and they are an excellent two sentence summary of this novel. Hannah, known up until now primarily for her emotional relationship fiction (á la Nicholas Sparks, with perhaps a touch less romance), takes on new ground in this book, published today by St. Martin's Press.

I'm pretty selective in the commercial fiction that I read, but a few months ago I was invited to a pre-publication dinner party with Kristin Hannah, so I promptly picked this book up to read.  Or rather, I picked up an advance audio version of the book to listen to on my commute.  This was a mistake, because while the reader herself was quite good, the audio direction was a little lacking.  Because most of this book takes place in France, the reader was apparently directed to render all of the dialogue with a French accent, despite the fact that the French characters would presumably be speaking French, and therefore a French-accented English is entirely unnecessary.

 I stopped listening to the audio and picked up the book to read instead. And man, this is a good story.  Let me be clear here, since I tend to review literary fiction on this blog.  This is not literary fiction, so please do not pick up The Nightingale and expect finely crafted prose.  Frankly, if that's the only thing you're looking for in your novels, you probably should not be reading my blog anyway. With this book, Hannah gets to the emotional heart of war and the human existence, and I'm not sure that you can ask for more than that out of a novel. What's more, she has brought to light for the first time in English the story of various French women and their resistance efforts during World War II, and any time that women's stories become less marginalized is a victory in my book.

Vianne and Isabelle are two sisters with very different sensibilities and priorities. After the Nazis invade France and the Vichy government takes over, they have polar opposite reactions.  Isabelle refuses to play by the new rules, preferring instead to thumb her nose at the new authorities while Vianne keeps her head down and tries to get by, knowing that with her husband fighting at the front, it is up to her to keep food on the table for her daughter, Sophie. Growing apart quickly, and with not much trust or love lost between them, little does the other suspect that each sister will eventually serve the resistance effort in her own way.

I think it's fair to say that when it comes to war stories, I've always been as interested in the stories of those who are left behind as I am in the narratives of those who actively fight at the front, if not more so. Not least because those are often women's stories, stories that become anonymous in the face of time, lacking the active glamorization of war that often accompanies men's stories.  Not to detract from any soldier's experience -- they were harrowing and defined by deprivation, I'm sure -- but Hannah's novel hits on the heart of war at home and the devastating choices one has to learn to make.

Unlike many wartime settings, Hannah leaves room for characters who are neither obviously heroic nor cowardly, but somewhere in between. It demands readers to think about what they would (or would not) do to keep their loved ones safe from harm: Would you feed another starving human if it means your own child will go without food? Would you risk your home as a safe house? Would you turn away from the torture or murder of a neighbor if interfering means capital punishment? How do you raise your child to be a moral person when you cannot set the example you wish to, because to do so is to risk your life or your child's? Above all, how can you possibly atone for the betrayal, albeit inadvertent, of a loved one?

More than anything else, I would say that this book demonstrates that the lines drawn in the sand between what we are and are not capable of doing are ever-shifting under the weight of our complicated humanity. Vianne's and Isabelle's narratives stayed with me for many weeks after I turned the last page, and I'm thankful to Kristin Hannah for giving their stories a place on my shelf.

I never did make it to the author dinner to which I'd been invited; it took place in Boston, about two hours away from me, on a night when the forecast was calling for a 100% chance of freezing rain & snow, and I've regretted not being able to attend ever since. My wonderful sales rep, Bob, managed to attend, however, and procure for me a signed copy in my absence. The book itself is quite beautiful, and it goes on sale in the US today, courtesy of St. Martin's Press.

Lovely map endpapers

Book Review: Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

It happens a few times a year: a publisher sends me a comp copy of an audio book that I would otherwise never pick up to read of my own accord, and in the process of listening to it I become terrifically surprised.  Such is the case when my Penguin sales rep, Karl, sent me the unabridged audio of Liane Moriarty's new novel, Big Little Lies, a couple of weeks ago.

I hadn't thought of reading this book, but I'm always willing to listen to books that I wouldn't dream of reading, as I enjoy listening to the audios in my car on my commute each day.  Little did I know just how enamored of this book I would become.

On the surface, the book seems like it could be a mystery: "Pirriwee Public’s annual school Trivia Night has ended in a shocking riot. One parent is dead. The school principal is horrified. As police investigate what appears to have been a tragic accident, signs begin to indicate that this devastating death might have been cold-blooded murder." 

Really, though, it's the story of female friendship amidst the perils and politics of modern parenting.

Also, it's Australian. I didn't know the author was Australian until I looked her up.  At first I just thought that the casting of an Australian reader for the audio was a quirky directional choice. Anyway, we've got Madeline, Celeste, and Jane, who are all mothers of children entering the kindergarten class at Pirowee Public, and the novel centers around them, telling their stories in a third person narrative that flits about from one to the other.

Madeline is in her forties, on her second marriage and third child.  She works part time and is that rare bird in this particular Sydney suburb: she is neither a Career Woman nor a Career Mom. She's funny, a little brash, obsessed with clothing and looking good, but she's also extremely loyal and passionate, and it takes the smallest thing to make her outraged. Her kindergarten daughter Chloe is feisty, kind, and imperious in fairly equal measure.

Celeste is a quiet woman who happens to be gorgeous -- not run of the mill gorgeous, but other-people-trip-up-walking-down-the-street-to-do-a-double-take gorgeous.  She's also introspective and a little distracted, unsure of her true worth, and amazed that a vivacious woman like Madeline would want to be friends with someone like her.  It eventually becomes clear just why it is so convenient that her husband travels out of the country frequently for his career, and in the meantime, her hands are full raising their twin boys full time.

Jane is single and the newcomer to Pirriwee, and a good 10-15 years younger than all of the other mothers.  She's hiding a secret about the identity of her boy Ziggy's father, and she's unsure whether to let herself be drawn into a friendship with Celeste or Madeline.  When Ziggy is accused on the first day of kindergarten orientation of choking a little girl, Jane and her son get off to a rocky start with all of the other parents and children.  If it weren't for Madeline championing her the whole way, life would be very lonely and difficult, indeed.

Moriarty positively nails the type of helicopter parent that has made a bad name for parents in this country, and via the character of Madeline she takes delight in skewering them. If this doesn't sound funny and interesting, then I'm just not doing a good job of telling it, because this book is both.  In spades.  In fact, I got so frustrated with the slow pace of listening to the audio that I borrowed the physical book to take home and read instead.  There are lots of clichés in this book, but Moriarty either turns them on their head or paints them in a new light through her humor and wry observations.  I loved the friendship that develops among Jane, Celeste, and Madeline, and I love the come-uppance that happens in the end. The reader, Caroline Lee, is great and she voices Madeline particularly well with a sexy voice and a husky, breathy tone.

 Nobody is more surprised than I am that this book resonated with me the way it did.  It's a light and very fast read that occasionally gives way to darker material. Material so dark, in fact, that it might bog down and change the tone of any other book.  In that sense, the book puts me in mind of Joshilyn Jackson's novel, Someone Else's Love Story.   

Book Review: Til the Well Runs Dry byLauren Francis-Sharma

It's not often that my two discrete audiences for this blog read the same posts.  My Book Blogger posse like the bookish ones, my Anguilla posse like the travel ones, and rarely the twain do meet, but I hope that today's post might find common ground between the two. It's a novel set mostly in Trinidad during the 1950s and 1960s, a time of political upheaval and change all over the Caribbean.

Author Lauren Francis-Sharma is the daughter of Trinidadian immigrants, and after visiting her grandmother's homeland, she decided to set her first novel there.  Though I've traveled up and down through the Caribbean, I've never been to Trinidad & Tobago, a dual island country unique in the region for its multi-ethnic heritage and industry beyond the usual tourism. Oh, and of course its tradition of Carnival. Trini Carnival makes all of those poor folks in New Orleans who celebrate Mardi Gras look like a child's clumsy efforts in comparison.

'Til the Well Runs Dry opens in the tiny village of Blanchisseuse in the 1940s, where Marcia Garcia is a 16-year-old seamstress trying to earn enough money to keep food in de bellies of what's left of her family. We soon meet Farouk Karam, the man whom she will grow to love and hate in equal measure, often simultaneously.  Farouk and Marcia share the narration for the first part of the novel until their second daughter adds her voice to the chorus.

If I were to describe this book in terms of its plot, it might sound very eventful--there are secrets here that politicians might kill to keep, not to mention rape, incest, murder, imprisonment, black magic, corruption, and abandonment--but that would give the wrong impression.  These plot points are present, but they're not the defining aspects of this novel.  It's much quieter and more intimate than that.  It's the story of a family: a mother whose hard knocks began long before her first two children go missing and her husband leaves her; a father whose thrall to his own parents prevents him from being the father he is capable of being; the four children who are the issue of this relationship that is more defined by tumultuous obsession than love.

Take this family and drop them in an ever-shifting political setting as Trinidad seeks its own way in the world separate from the British Empire, and you end up with a story that is as colorful and multi-layered as the book cover would suggest.  Francis-Sharma's writing is so evocative of this tropical island that I could see, hear, taste, and smell everything she was describing. Though the narratives themselves are third person, limited points of view, the dialogue is rich with the speech patterns and idioms of Caribbean patois.

I loved reading this novel and I was completely swept up in the complications of this family and their ties to each other, knotted up so tightly and frayed by the coastal salt water that it would take a machete to hack them apart.  More than anything, Francis-Sharma was able to convincingly portray what it might be like to love somebody so fiercely that surviving such a love could only change and harden and temper you into a fierce creature yourself.

I recommend this book for readers who value strong and complicated female characters, those who enjoy historical fiction in an unusual setting, and those who, like me, have an unquenchable thirst for Caribbeana.  There was much about this book that reminded me of early Toni Morrison, and honestly, is there higher praise that I could offer on that score?

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book that was provided at my request by the publisher.  It will be published in the US by Henry Holt on 22 April 2014. 

Book (P)Review: Another Piece of My Heart by Jane Green (audio)

My bookstore received a comp audio of Another Piece of My Heart, so I took a chance on it.  I'd read Jemima J before, but that's about all I knew of Jane Green, other than a vague sense of being chick-lit.  I have different criteria for audio books than for books I read, so I was happy to have this to listen on my commute, despite its not being a title I'd have chosen to read.

The author does her own reading, and at first I found her voice extremely grating.  By the time I came to the end, it didn't bother me nearly as much, but I still wouldn't rate her as a particularly good reader.  It was also mildly disconcerting listening to her American characters speak with her heavily British-inflected voice.

At first I thought the point of view was strictly third person, but then I got to disc #5 and BAM--it switched to first person.  I'm not a fan of multiple narrators or POV switches, and it felt completely random, but eventually the book shifted regularly between third person and first person for most chapters in the second half.  I think this is very lazy writing and it's rarely done well. 

It's the store of a blended family: father, stepmom, two daughters, and an exwife.  Except the older daughter is a nightmare and everybody knows it except her.  The father, Ethan, is so namby-pamby and ineffectual that he might as well be a father from the fairy tales. The stepmother, Andi, isn't wicked at all. She's perfectly sane, if a bit quick to overreact. The exwife is in a drunken state for the first half of the book and hardly worth mentioning. The younger daughter is pliable and reasonable beyond her years.

Lots of family drama: teenage hissy fits, drunken pregnancies, abandoned babies. Emily, the older daughter and the first person narrator in the book, is the most self-absorbed teen I've ever met in fiction OR in real life, and that's saying something.  Listening to her sections was excruciating. If I'd been reading them, the book would have been thrown across the room.

I am part of a blended family myself, though in my case it's the grandchildren who are the ages of the children in this book, and I get that it's hard on both sides.  But this book was so full of angst and drama that it was hard to take seriously, or at least it would have been if I'd been reading it.  Listening to it, though, somehow diminishes its flaws, and I'm not sure why that's the case.

Book Review: Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan

Ugh, what a disappointment! First of all, I was expecting non-fiction, but that's my fault for not knowing enough about the book when I picked it up. But more importantly, I was expecting something with a LOT more substance than this book has. I read her first book, Shutterbabe, which was the story of her time as a photojournalist in war-torn countries, and it was just great. Reading The Red Book (a story about four women at their 20th year reunion for Harvard University) makes me feel as if the author has somehow sold out, leaving behind her heavy-hitting stories of worldwide strife for a group of standard and cliched tales of suburban life post-graduation. It teeters dangerously on the brink of being one of those, "oh, it's so hard to be a white person of privilege" books. I didn't quite manage to finish this one 'cause I was pretty sure that I'd just want to throw the book across the room if I did.

Marketing is calling this book "The Big Chill for the Facebook generation." I don't think so. I *will* admit, however, that if my expectations had been adjusted downward, I might have been able to enjoy this book more. Readers who love J. Courtney Sullivan's Commencement or those who simply want a light & easy read or those who attended Harvard themselves and also feverishly read their own respective Red Books when they arrive in the mail will probably find enjoyment in this book. 

NB: I requested a copy of this book from my sales rep because I loved Shutterbabe and it will be published in April by Hyperion.  Too bad it doesn't live up to the author's early potential.  

Book P(Review): The Lion Is In by Delia Ephron

My sales rep sent me an ARC of The Lion Is In by Delia Ephron, and though I don't think I would have otherwise picked it up on my own, I'm surprised by how enjoyable it is. Two runaway women meet a third runaway woman and together they stumble upon a bar in the middle of nowhere. And oh, yeah--there's a lion, which means things are gonna get interesting.

This book turned out to be light and fun and the perfect palate cleanser after reading a stream of extremely dark (but excellent) novels back to back. This is a story where mostly nothing bad happens and things come out right in the end. You've got to enjoy a book that throws together Marcel the Lion, the hapless driver's ed instructor, a jewel thief, the downtrodden bartender who longs for the love of a good woman, a former Miss North Carolina, and a moronic preacher whose ideals make him the perfect 21st century counterpart to Jane Austen's Mr. Collins. The fact that Marcel becomes  a combination of guru/higher power/shrink for two of the women is pure bonus.

I recommend this book for anybody who is looking for something on the lighter side. I have the strong feeling that the author might turn this chic lit into a chick flick. Think "Thelma & Louise" meets anything by Billie Letts, minus the cliffside-plunge-to-the-death, and you'll have the right idea.

This was not a book that I ruined with dog-ears to mark my favorite passages, but here's one that gives a flavor of the book:

"Rita thinks and it comes back to her what she sensed when she saw him [Marcel the Lion]. She feels it again, something stirring inside her. Barely there, yet for most people it would be unmistakable: a sense of beginning. Rita, however, is so unfamiliar with adventure or possibility that she can't tell the difference between something auspicious and a stomachache (24)."

NB: This book will be published in May by Blue Rider Press, a division of Penguin. It also happens to qualify for my ninth book read for the New Author Challenge, sponsored by Literary Escapism.