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. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land.
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. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. 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. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. Whatever its flaws, it's Michener, and the 750,000 first printing leaves no doubt about anything but the cast of the mini-series. Withal, however, Alaska clops forward at a satisfying pace, the breathtaking landscape is a constant presence, and if the prose doesn't sing, it seldom gets in the way. Christianity is called "worthier" than indigenous beliefs) is disconcerting. As history, this lacks both rigor and substance: Natives are everywhere sentimentalized, and the bias toward Christianity (missionaries and native converts are "saints" at one point. Michener's characters are no more than puppets, and you can see him pulling the strings.
The territory offers inherent drama (the treatment of Aleuts by Russia is a story as ugly as any in the history of colonialism), and Michener has unearthed some fascinating episodes (a 1000-mile midwinter bicycle trip along the frozen surface of the Yukon River the New Deal resettlement of 900 midwestern farmers in Alaska's Matanuska Valley), but the material never becomes convincing fiction-all the seams show. With his trademark brand of pedagogy, Michener steers his characters through: the arrival and development of major native groups, European exploration and Russian and American colonization, the gold rush, industrial exploitation by the Lower Forty-eight and the struggle for statehood, and, in a tightly packed final section, geo-politics, macroeconomics, the legal tangle of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the life it has fostered amongst the thereby wealthy natives. Class convenes with plate tectonics and, before the final bell is rung, Michener doles out nearly 900 pages of Alaskan history in candy-coated, bite-sized vignettes.
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