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The Distance from Normandy: A Novel
Binding: Paperback
Author: Mr. Jonathan Hull
Release Date: 2004-11-25
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Griffin
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Average Rating: 4.5
Total Customer Reviews: 22
List Price: $17.99
Our Price: $17.99
Sales Rank: 775997
Product Description
Mead parachuted into Normandy on D-Day and fought his way to Germany, through some of the most brutal violence of World War II. But his most difficult battle was lost years later, when his beloved wife Sophie succumbed to cancer. Since then, he has waged a private war against both loneliness and the terrible memory of a day in 1945 that went horribly wrong-and has haunted him ever since. His grandson Andrew, a scared and angry high school sophomore, has been expelled and is heading down a path of self-destruction. Mead agrees to take the boy in for three weeks, to set him right. At first, the two circle warily around each other, finding little in common. Then Andrew befriends a widow named Evelyn, and Mead busies himself fending off the match, even as he feels a reluctant attraction to this cheerful woman who seems to understand his grandson. One afternoon, rummaging through the garage, Andrew discovers an antique Luger, the deadly memento of his grandfather's war. In a final effort to save his grandson from himself, Mead takes the teenager on a journey to the beaches, bunkers, and cemeteries of Normandy, where both of them confront the secrets they have been trying to forget.
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Users Product Reviews: |
Product Review Summary: I have not received this item! Where is my order? I have tried to navigate the help menu to no avail!
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Product Review Summary: Interestingly done In my continuing effort to do more reading about Normandy and the other places in France to which we will be traveling, I read this novel last week.
Mead, an elderly World War II veteran who took part in the D-Day invasion, is haunted by memories of the war and his late wife, Sophie. His only child lives half a continent away and when she calls to ask him to take his troubled grandson, Andrew, for a few weeks, Mead's life is turned upside down.
Andrew has gotten into trouble and been expelled - he brought a knife to school and threatened someone who had bullied him. His academics were pretty bad too and he is probably going to have to repeat the grade.
Neither Andrew nor Mead are happy with the new living arrangement and their first weeks together are difficult at best. Each distrusts the other and the two-generation gap seems insurmountable. Andrew is an unhappy, secretive kid who is mourning the suicide of his best (and only) friend. He befriends Evelyn, an elderly neighbor who is somehow able to reach him, and encourages his grandfather to spend time with her.
Time passes and an almost-tragic event leads Mead to take Andrew to visit the D-Day beaches, battlefields, and cemeteries in France, and then on to Germany where he hopes to make peace with himself. The trip forges a new bond between the two despite their innate differences. The end was satisfying, which I cannot say about all the novels that I read.
Here is my favorite line in the book: "It wasn't happiness he sought...It was the brief absence of pain that he cherished."
Hull has done a good job of character development, which is the most important thing in this book. And I learned a lot about D-Day and afterward, which was why I wanted to read it in the first place!
Product Review Summary: wonderful, entertaining This book is rather a slow starter, but stick with it and it becomes a page turner with characters you will care about. Mead's WWII tour is revealed in flashbacks and the reader learns what shaped him into he man he is today. His grandson, Andrew, has his own haunted past and the widow next door is keeping a secret. Beautifully written by a talented author.
Product Review Summary: Sad and touching Both grandfather and grandson are more the same than they realize. Each generation feels isolated, yet is each going through the same sort of loss and fear over losing loved ones. I loved the interspersed flashbacks that Mead has; they show how much of a young, scared man he still is, even inside an older man's body. Highly recommended!
Product Review Summary: Heal thyself first In THE DISTANCE FROM NORMANDY, two lives of quiet desperation, further divided by a two-generation gap, intersect.
Mead, in his late 70s, lives in San Diego. His beloved wife of 51 years died of cancer three years previous. Now, he joylessly trudges from day to day living with her ghost - and the ghosts of his comrades killed in combat against the Nazis when they parachuted into Normandy on D-Day with the 101st Airborne. Oh, and Andrew, the difficult teenage son of his single-parent, dysfunctional daughter, is just pulling up at the curb for a visit.
At 16, Andrew is a physically unprepossessing nerd. By his own estimation, he ranks 2,888 out of 3,000 on his high school's social ladder. He's ignored by girls, and bullied by boys. He was recently suspended for pulling a knife on one of his tormentors. Andrew's ghost is that of his best friend Matt, another social outcast, who recently committed suicide. Andrew is tempted to follow.
Mead's first impression of Andrew:
"What a punk, thought Mead, studying his grandson, whose enormous jeans could easily have fit on the biggest man in Mead's old rifle company. He wore dirty, unlaced sneakers ... and a large and rumpled black T-shirt with some sort of Satanic omen painted on it. He had a small, gold hoop earring in his left earlobe and his hair ... looked like it had been cut with shears, then fermented under a helmet for several weeks. In short, the boy looked like a refugee or drug freak."
At one point, Andrew shouts at his grandfather:
"You expect everybody to be like you, don't you? Well, I don't want to be like you! Why would anybody want to be like you? You don't have any friends, you don't do anything all day ... All you've got are your stupid medals and your stupid secret memories about stuff that happened decades ago ... Well, I don't want to turn out like you. I'd rather die."
This visit should go well, don't you think?
The prose of THE DISTANCE FROM NORMANDY doesn't have the powerful eloquence and elegance of Hull's previous work, LOSING JULIA, which perhaps has the capacity to reduce a sensitive person to tears (see my review dated 4-14-01). However, the strength of author Jonathan Hull's writing is that it poignantly conveys the human condition in general and that of his characters in particular. When, in flashback, Mead remembers for the reader his wartime experiences, one is perhaps reminded of the TV miniseries BAND OF BROTHERS, also about a company of 101st Airborne troopers fighting their way into Hitler's Reich.
The crisis in the plot occurs when Mead discovers Andrew with his finger on the trigger of a Luger pistol, one of the former's wartime souvenirs. In a last, desperate effort to put some iron in the boy, Mead takes him for a tour of the Normandy battlefields. And it's there that Mead himself must confront his most implacable and most secret ghost. Only then can he be healed and become a role model for Andrew.
As these two crippled lives collided, I thought the bridging of their differences a bit too pat and too tidy for me to award more than four stars. A TV adaptation would be the perfect Sunday night tearjerker, but not represent real life, in which too many loose ends form a ragged edge. But THE DISTANCE FROM NORMANDY is an engaging read, and I look forward to Hull's next offering.
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