Books Set in North America; Washington State

Between Sisters, by Kristin Hannah (2003)

Read:  September 30, 2025

3 Stars

Books Set in Asia and North America; Vietnam and California

The Women, by Kristin Hannah (2024)

Read: January 31, 2025

3 Stars

Books Set in North America, United States, Seattle, Washington

Firefly Lane, by Kristen Hannah (2008)

 

This is a novel about a life-long friendship between two women who couldn’t be more different.  They became friends as young teens, when Tully Hart and her hippy mother, Cloud, moves into the house across the street from Kate Mularkey.  Although Kate and her mother have the normal teen mother-daughter struggles, she comes from a stable middle-class family.  Tully, on the other hand, lives mostly with her grandmother unless her mother floats into her life for brief periods.

 

Tully is a risk taker.  She decided early on that she was going to become a star reporter.  Nothing will stop in her way.  As teens, both girls were going to pursue that path, but that wasn’t the route that Kate wanted.  Kate knows that Tully always gets what she wants.  When both young women intern at the local television station, both are smitten by Johnny.

 

Sadly, this book is filled with cliches.  I quickly tired of the constant pop culture references beginning in the 1970s and continued throughout the length of the book, which ended around 2008.  The author constantly teases the reader into thinking that a rift will divide the friendship, and hints that the rift will be over Johnny.  The rift, which the reader knows is coming, is actually over another matter.

 

As Kate and Johnny’s daughter, Marah, becomes a teenager, she and Kate enter into their own teen-age mother/daughter struggle.  Marah turns to her “Aunt Tully”, who typically takes Marah’s side.  Hence the rift, which actually came about when Tully basically accused Kate of being an overprotective mother on live television.  After this event, the two women didn’t speak to each other for some unspecified years.

 

The point the author is trying to make is that in life, family is what matters most.  This comes only in the last 30 or so pages (and this is quite a long book).  As the book nears the end, we learn that Kate, who married Johnny after she became pregnant, has inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) and is dying.  She thinks that Tully is after Johnny but has reconciled with that thought.  Although Johnny had a one-night stand with Tully before he and Kate married, he was truly in love with Kate.

 

I read the book in its entirety.  If this had been the first book I read by Kristen Hannah, it would not have been inclined to read her other books.

 

Read:  October 10, 2021

 

3 Stars

Books Set in North America: United States: Texas and California

The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah (2021)

 

The novel opens in 1921 in the Texas panhandle.  The economy is booming and life is good.  Elsa Wolcott is the eldest daughter of a wealthy family.  She is, however, tall, unattractive and unmarriageable, or so her parents tell her.  When she was fourteen, she suffered an illness and now her parents keep her sheltered.

 

One night, she meets Rafe Martinelli, a young man several years younger.  She falls head-over-heels and soon her reputation is ruined.  Her father demands that she marry Rafe, then her family disowns her.  Elsa and Rafe begin their married life living with his parents on a farm.  Although Elsa had never worked hard in her life, she soon comes to love the farm.  Rafe’s parents, although disappointed that Rafe’s life has taken a turn, soon come to love Elsa as their own.  For the first time, Elsa feels love.

 

By the mid-1930’s life has changed.  Dust storms and droughts devastate farmlands.  Elsa struggles to keep life going on the farm for the sake of her two young children.  After one particularly bad dust storm, however, Elsa has had enough.  She packs the farm’s only truck and with her children in tow, heads for California.  They have heard that California is the land of milk and honey and jobs are plentiful.

 

Unfortunately, once they reach California, Elsa realizes that she has no idea where to turn to next.  The harsh reality sets in.  Californians resent the migration of “Okies”, a generic term they used to describe all migrants coming to escape the Dust Belt.  The children are discriminated against in school, and hospitals will not accept the Okies.  Eventually, Elsa gets a job picking cotton, but soon learns that she is paid on credit, and must use the company store for all her groceries and needs.

 

Workers are beginning to get restless, and the Communist party begins to organize strikes.  I learned a lot about what life was like for the migrants.  It was a fast read.

 

Read:  March 27, 2021

 

4 stars

 

Books Set in Europe: France

The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah (2015)

The Nightingale is the story of two French sisters who, each in her own way, survive the Nazi occupation of France during World War II.  The sisters are 10 years apart in age, and are motherless with a cold father who was a changed man after returning from World War I.

Vianne, the older sister, married young to the love of her life.  Her younger sister, Isabelle, was impetuous, and had been expelled from several boarding schools before the War began.  After Vianne’s husband goes off to war, Vianne is left at the family home with their young daughter.  Isabelle’s childhood heroine was Edith Cavell, who was executed in World War I.  Isabelle wants to follow in Cavell’s footsteps and joins a Resistance group, leading downed British and American soldiers cross the Pyrenees from France into Spain.  Her code name is The Nightingale, which also happens to be the English translation of their family surname ~ Rossignol.

This novel focuses on the lives of the women during the war and the sacrifices they were forced to make while their fathers, husbands and brothers were fighting.  The novel begins in 1939, just before Nazi occupation.  As France is forced into War, the Nazis begin rationing food and occupying homes.  A young German officer requisitions her home, although he is kind to Vianne and her daughter.  One day Vianne is asked to provide the names of the Jews in her town.  Believing that it is simply a list of names, she complies, giving up the name of her best friend and neighbor, Rachel.  Later, the Nazis begin rounding up all the Jews and communists.  Rachel is taken away, but Vianne takes her young son to raise as her own.

Later a brutal SS officer commanders her home and brutally rapes her.  Meanwhile, Isabelle is risking her life in the Resistance.  She acquires false papers and becomes known as Juliette Gervaise.  She doesn’t fully understand the risk she is taking until after she is capture.  She is ultimately sent to a German concentration camp, where her mantra become “Stay alive.”

This book gives the horrors of war and captures the terror of the citizens of France.  It is one of the best novels of the Holocaust that I have read in a long time.

5 Stars

Read:  February 14, 2016