The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah

Hard on the heels of the thrilling novel of World War II and a pair of youngsters caught up in the Nazi invasion of France, I approached Kristin Hannah’s latest novel, The Nightingale, which involves the same subject.  This time, however, no young German boys were involved.  Anthony Doerr’s novel, All the Light We Cannot See, would be a hard act to follow.  Kristin Hannah has placed a close second to Doerr.

Kristin Hannah has written a slew of novels and has an impressive list of awards.  She lives in Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest with her son.

The Nightingale tells the story of two sisters.  When their mother died, their father shipped them off to boarding school.  Vianne, the elder of the two, becomes pregnant and soon marries the father of her daughter, Sophie.  Vianne’s father does not approve of the husband or the marriage, so he sends her and Sophie to a summer home in the south of France.  Meanwhile, her younger sister, Isabelle, is charming, beautiful, precocious, and very much the rebel.  She runs away numerous times, and finally is expelled from the school.  She returns to Paris and her father’s bookstore.  Then, the Nazis invade France, and chaos takes over.  Papa orders her out of the house, gives her money for a travel to Carriveau to join Vianne in what he believes to be relative safety.

Vianne’s husband leaves for the front, and is soon a P.O.W.  Shortages begin, and then the Germans arrive and occupy the town.  Vianne’s house is requisitioned by a German Captain.  She must allow him to live in her home, or Captain Beck will seize the house and expel her and Sophie.  Then Isabelle shows up.  All this occurs in the first 20 pages or so, so the meat of the plot lies sprawled before the reader.

While exciting in spots, something about the writing seemed a bit off in places.  I detected shades of a romance novel here and there, which is Hannah’s primary genre.  However, I never wanted to abandon the novel, even though I believe I subconsciously compared Hannah to Doerr.  The novel is heavy on dialogue, and I found myself wishing for more introspection, more description.  Here is a sample of Isabelle’s desperate attempt to escape Paris.  Hannah writes, “Hours passed.  The automobile made its slow, agonizing way south.  Isabelle was grateful for the dust.  It coated the window and obscured the terrible, depressing scene. // People.  Everywhere.  In front of them, behind them, beside them, so thick was the crowd that the automobile could only inch forward in fits and starts.  It was like driving through a swarm of bees that pulled apart for a second and then swarmed again.  The sun was punishingly hot.  It turned the smelly automobile interior into an oven and beat down on the women outside who were shuffling toward…what?  No one knew what exactly was happening to them or where safety lay ahead. // The car lurched forward and stopped hard.  Isabelle hit the seat in front of her.  The children immediately began to cry for their mother. // ‘Merde.’  Monsieur Humbert Muttered. // ‘M’sieur Humbert,’ Patricia said primly.  ‘The Children.’ // An old woman pounded on the car’s bonnet as she shuffled past. // ‘That’s it, then, Madame Humbert.’ he said.  ‘We are out of petrol’”  (36).

I also encountered a few phrases my creative writing class might recognize as clichés.  But despite all the minor drawbacks, it is an exciting story with lots of twists and turns.  Kristin Hannah’s latest novel, The Nightingale will certainly hold a reader’s attention all the way to the end.  4-1/2 stars.

--Chiron, 9/8/15

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen

My main reading guilty pleasure includes several former (or current) newspaper journalists turned novelists.  Pete Dexter, Jennifer Weiner, and Carl Hiaasen tops the list.  According to the author's bio in his latest novel, Bad Monkey, Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida and has authored 12 novels.  He also has four children's books, four works of non fiction, and four co-authored novels.  Carl still writes a column for The Miami Herald.  While I am not a big fan of murder mysteries, something about Hiaasen's style draws me in again and again.  I have now read five of his novels and enjoyed everyone.

Andrew Yancy is a skinny homicide detective who assaults his lover’s husband when he abuses her.  The wealthy man threatens a law suit, and Yancy is demoted to “roach patrol,” or restaurant inspector as punishment.  When a fishing boat lands a human arm, Yancy is asked to take it to the Miami Medical Examiner.  The police chief of sleepy, quiet Big Pine Key hopes the case will go away.  He has no desire to take on a homicide investigation.  The ME examines the limb but refuses to keep it.  Against instructions from the chief, Yancy takes it home and stores it in his freezer.  The incident is labeled a “boating accident.”  A couple of shootings occur and they seem to be unrelated, but the detective in Yancy is not so sure.  He begins accumulating clues.

A sub-plot involves the construction of a monstrous summer home, which provides some comic relief – although Yancy himself is pretty comical.  Throw in the Dragon Queen – a voodoo priestess -- a man angered by the destruction of his family home, and a nasty little monkey, and the reader is in for a rollicking ride.

Hiaasen always draws interesting and eccentric characters.  He writes, “The phone kept ringing, but Yancy didn’t answer it.  He was drinking rum, sitting in a plastic lawn chair.  From next door came the offensive buzz of wood saws and the metallic pops of a nail gun.  The absentee owner of the property was erecting an enormous spec house that had no spiritual place on Big Pine Key, and furthermore interfered with Yancy’s modest view of the sunset.  It was Yancy’s fantasy to burn the place down as soon as the roof framing was finished. // He heard a car stop in his driveway but didn’t rise from the chair.  His visitor was a fellow detective, Rogelio Burton.  // ‘Why don’t you pick up your phone?’ Burton said. // ‘You believe that monstrosity? It’s like a [damn] mausoleum.’ // Burton sat down beside him. // [The Police Chief] wants you to take a road trip.’ // ‘Miami?’” 

Like most heroes asked to embark on an adventure, Yancy at first declines, but he then decides he better go north in the hope getting his badge back.

Like all good mystery writers, Carl Hiaasen’s latest novel slowly reveals the truth of the wayward arm.  Bad Monkey will satisfy anyone’s thirst for a good old whodunit.  5 stars

--Chiron, 8/13/15

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

My faithful readers are well-aware of my love for the Man Booker Prize collection of novels.  I first discovered this treasure trove of literary works when I came across Anita Brookner’s prize-winner, Hotel du Lac.  On this, the sixth anniversary of Likely Stories, I return to the author of the first novel I reviewed. 

Anita Brookner was born in Herne Hill, a suburb of London.  She was the only child of Newson Bruckner, a Polish immigrant to Britain, and Maude Schiska, a singer whose father had emigrated from and founded a tobacco factory.  Maude changed the family's surname to Brookner because of anti-German sentiment in Britain.  Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle lived with the family, and her parents, secular Jews, opened their house to Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution during the 1930s and World War II .  Brookner was educated at the private James Allen's Girls' School.  In 1949 she received a BA in History from King's College London, and in 1953 a doctorate in Art History from the Courtland Institute of Art, University of London.  Brookner has not married, but took care of her parents as they aged.

This wonderfully introspective novel traces the journey of “Edith Hope, a writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name,” -- as Brookner labels her -- has committed a social faux pas of immense proportions.  Her friend Penelope bundles her off for a month at the end-of-season to Hotel du Lac in Switzerland.  There she wanders around the lake, works on her latest novel, and makes the acquaintance of several denizens of the sparsely occupied hotel. 

Hotel du Lac, Vevey, Switzerland

Brookner writes, “The result of all this was to re-open in Edith’s mind the question of what behavior most becomes a woman, the question around which she had written most of her novels, the question she had attempted to argue with Harold Web [her publisher], the question she had failed to answer and which she now saw to be of the most vital importance.  The excitement she thus experienced at being provided with an opportunity to study the question at first hand was if anything heightened by the fact that everything Mrs. Pusey had said so far was of the utmost triviality.  Clearly there were depths here that deserved her prolonged attention” (40).

Edith immersed herself in her novel, and garnered endless thoughts and comments by the somewhat eccentric guests living out the last days of the fall season at Hotel du Lac.  She slowly begins folding the experiences of others into her current novel.  Slowly, she comes to a rational solution to her exile, and returns to London – wiser, more confidant, and fully in charge of her future.

This pleasant, short novel slowly reveals the peculiar reason for Edith’s exile to Switzerland, which has some significant effect on her outlook -- past, present, and future.  I also recommend Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac as a great introduction to the amazingly entertaining series of Booker Prize winners.  A wonderful summer, autumn, winter or spring read.  5 stars

--Chiron, 8/7/15

The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

While straightening out my shelves, I came across a book I read when I was in about 7th grade.  Thanks to Sister Stella Marie, who alone encouraged me to read books I enjoyed even if they verged on adult titles.  The book I recently pulled from the shelf was The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.  The dust jacket is long gone, and it has several stains on the cover, but I immediately became overcome with memories and emotions from those days. 

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born August 8, 1896 in Washington, D.C.  She lived in rural Florida and wrote of rural themes and settings.  Her most beloved novel was The Yearling.  She lived in numerous places around the country working as a journalist.  By 1928, they settled in rural Florida after buying a 72-acre farm in Frontier Florida in the Ocala National Forest, southeast of Gainesville.  The Rawlings Society quoted Marjorie, when she described the wilds of her new home.  She wrote, "This was not the Gold coast of Florida.  It was a primitive section off the beaten path, where men hunted and fished and worked small groves and farms for a meager living.  And the country was beautiful, with its mysterious swamps, its palms, its great live oaks, dripping gray Spanish moss, its deer and bear and raccoons and panthers and reptiles." Marjorie died December 14, 1953 in St. Augustine, Florida. 

Back in seventh grade, I never knew any of this, as I sat immersed in the delightful story of Jody, his father Penny, and Ma Baxter as they desperately tried to scratch out a meager existence.  They competed for food and a safe place to raise offspring with raccoons, foxes, bears, deer, wolves, coyotes, rattle snakes, and the Florida panther, which was one of the first species added to the U.S. Endangered Species List in 1973.  Today, there are less than 100 Florida panthers left in the wild.

I noticed two curious things about the booked I so loved then – which may have been the first novel I read twice.  First is the dialect spoken by the settlers in the early nineteenth century.  Although a bit strange at first, I quickly adapted to the local tongue; however, this time I had a dictionary of American Slang close to hand all the while I read.  The second was the wonderfully astute cracker barrel philosophy of Penny. 

Rawlings wrote, “Jody’s mother had accepted her youngest with something of detachment, as though she had given all she had of love and care and interest to those other [children she lost].  But Penny’s bowels yearned over his son.  He gave him something more than his paternity.  He found that the child stood wide-eyed and breathless before the miracle of bird and creature, of flower and tree, of wind and rain, and sun and moon, as he had always stood.  And if, on a soft day in April, the boy had prowled away on his boy’s business, he could understand the thing that had drawn him.  He understood, too, its briefness. // His wife’s bulk stirred and she made a sound in her sleep.  He would act on any such occasion, he knew, as a bulwark for the boy against the mother’s sharpness.  The whip-poor-will flew farther into the forest and took up his lament again, sweet with distance.  The moonlight moved beyond the focus of the bedroom window.  // ‘Leave him kick up his heels,’ he thought, ‘and run away.  Leave him build his flutter-mills.  The day’ll come, he’ll not even care to’” (20-21).

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling has withstood the hurricane of time for me.  I found it as warm, sad, joyous, and heart-breaking as I did back in the late ‘50s.  If you have never read it, or if you have, travel back in time and relive your own childhood innocence and wonder at the beauty of nature.  5 stars

--Chiron, 8/7/15