Noah is about to head off to spend his 80th birthday in France, where he was born, although he hasn't been back since he was a child, when he suddenly finds himself with emergency custody of his great-nephew and has no choice but to bring him along on the trip. They don't exactly relate to each other easily. Meanwhile, he's also looking for answers to some recently raised questions about his family history.

It's hard to describe my reaction to this novel, because I feel like I have a lot of good will towards it, and yet I find it lacking at the same time. I do relate to Noah and his well-meaning but deeply awkward attempts to connect with the boy, who has had a really rough life but who is also just obnoxious in that way that only eleven-year-old boys can be. Noah and his concerns and his little lectures and everything felt very real to me, too, but 340 pages of basically nothing but those concerns and lectures was a bit much, and after a while I found my perspective popping back and forth between feeling like I was listening to this sympathetic old man rambling on about stuff he cared about and feeling like I was sitting through an author expositing at length about the results of the research she did on topics like photography and chemistry and prisons and the history of Nice and the French resistance. Which did try my patience a little.

It probably didn't help that I didn't find any of the family mystery stuff especially compelling, nor did I actually buy into any of the preliminary conclusions Noah jumps to about his mother enough to be emotionally invested in them. I mean, I liked Noah well enough, so I cared that he cared, but I didn't care much in my own right, if that makes sense, except for a few genuinely touching moments towards the end. I cared a lot more about his relationship with the kid, but there's not really any big breakthrough that happens there, despite Noah making a major but fairly predictable decision about it at the end.

So, basically... I liked these people (well, OK, like is a strong word for the kid, but he definitely had his moments), and I believed in them, and I didn't mind spending time with them. I finished the novel with a feeling of genuinely wishing them well. But I also finished it feeling glad to finally be leaving their company. So I think this one would have worked better for me if it were, say, novella-length. ( )

Noah Selvaggio is a newly retired chemistry professor, whose wife and only sister have passed away, leaving him alone. For his eightieth birthday he is planning a trip to Nice, where he was born and lived until 1942 when his mother sent him to New York to his father. His memories of the city and his famous photographer grandfather are few, but he is curious to reconnect with his past. On the eve of his trip, two things happen. First he uncovers some enigmatic photographs of his mother's that raise questions, and second, he is contacted by social services and asked if he can take in his grandnephew. His nephew had died of an apparent drug overdose several years earlier, and he has never met his grandnephew or his mother, who is currently incarcerated. Reluctantly he agrees to take the boy on a temporary basis and applies for a rush passport.

Thus begins a sweet story of an old man, a tween-aged boy, and their attempt to both get to know one another and solve the mystery of the photographs. I enjoyed the characters of Noah and Michael and the story of their relationship, as well as the historical aspects about the Holocaust, Resistance, and collaboration in WWII Nice. Emma Donoghue is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors for historical fiction. ( )

Emma Donoghue has a gift for achingly accurate portrayals of emotionally wounded children. I wanted to hug Michael, to give him a new phone and to get his mother out of prison. All the subtle details and the slow unwinding of his many hurts and indignities. Brilliant. An Noah too, a widowed 79 year old former chemistry professor heading towards an empty end of life. I was fearful as he stepped up to the challenge of looking after his grand-nephew. It would have been a lot for Noah to look after him even if they'd stayed in NYC, but to take him to Nice. Wow. And wow it turned the story up a notch. Add to all that, the complication of what Noah was looking for when they got to Nice, about what his mother had been up to in WWII, whether he should be proud of her or ashamed. The balancing off of the two relatives, their many backstories, their connections and differences, was such a satisfying read. I'm still thinking about it. Love love love this book. ( )

Enjoyed the dynamic between eleven year old Michael and his sudden guardian, Noah, however, other elements of this didn’t work as well for me.

It seemed like every time Noah researched something that research was regurgitated on to the page and I’m just not a fan of that, if I wanted to read dry facts, I, too, could look them up online, I’m picking up this book to read a fictional narrative and if facts are necessary to tell the story, then I want them woven into it in a seamless and interesting way.

I wasn’t really a fan of the how the mystery (of sorts) about Noah’s mother unfolded, either, it reflected an important time in history, yes, but that still didn’t make it as emotionally engaging as I would have liked. The info-dumps certainly hampered this aspect of the book, as did Noah’s tendency to jump to conclusions. Noah’s a scientist and a professor, in other areas of this book he appeared to be an intelligent person, yet when it came to his mother this intelligent person leapt to conclusions that would be few people’s first guesses about their mother. It just seemed like his conclusions were less about how a person would actually think than they were about the need to stretch out that part of the plot.

The most frustrating part is the plot didn’t need the mom’s past, it didn’t need the info dumps or the photographer grandfather, less of all that stuff that fell kind of flat would have left more pages to dig into Michael and Noah’s relationship, and their characters, maybe even give Michael his own POV since arguably he was the one going through the most harrowing changes in his life.

I was invested in these two strangers meeting, having to learn how to live together and also travel together, the petty battles over how many times a day the kid could drink coke. The generational gap, the financial gap, it was a whole bunch of awkward, plenty of rudeness and frustration, not far off from how I’d imagine things would go between a senior citizen and a kid forced into each other’s orbits. Had the book just stuck to that I might have loved it. ( )

Septuagenarian widower Noah is planning to return to Nice, the town of his birth, to mark his 80th birthday. The grandson of a famous French photographer, Noah wants to look into his family history there, and perhaps identify the subjects of some old photos he inherited.

Shortly before his departure, Noah is contacted by social services. The son of his deceased drug addict nephew, Michael, needs a guardian and a home, since his mother is in jail. Very reluctantly, out of a sense of family duty, Noah takes Michael on rather than consign him to a home. Preferring not to cancel his visit, he takes Michael to Nice with him.

To begin with, this feels like a familiar trope of an adult dragging a resentful kid around Europe, until the brutally candid Michael says something about one of the photos that causes Noah to look again, and then to question his family history. Donoghue then twists the story to being about Noah's need to establish the truth of what his family did during WW2.

It's an interesting plot, far better than promised at the outset, but I still struggled with this book. I could not find a single redeeming feature in the character of Michael, whom Donoghue depicts as an unmitigated pre-teen horror. There is some attempt by the author to stir up sympathy for him, but I just could not bring myself to care about his fate and, since the novel is pretty much entirely about Michael and Noah, that's a serious flaw. ( )