On the way fireflies fly up

Vietnamese readers are no strangers to Kristin Hannah as she is a beloved novelist through the book The Lark Still Sings. After that, many other works were published in the country, including The Things We Do, The Female Pilot, The Four Winds and the upcoming The Women. At the end of 2024, The Lark Still Sings was voted by readers of the New York Times as one of the 100 best books of the 21st century, while The Women was honored as one of the best historical novels of last year. The Vietnamese version of The Fireflies' Way has just been released and has also attracted great attention, as the special edition quickly "sold out" after 3 days of pre-order.

Author Kristin Hannah

PHOTO: THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Woman's Story

The book spans nearly three decades, starting in the 1970s when Tully, a girl abandoned by her drug-addicted mother, unexpectedly meets Kate, a girl her own age who has no connection with friends or family. Through their unexpected encounter when Tully moves to live near Kate's house on Fireflies Lane, the two girls gradually grow up and become women who are strongly, permanently, and firmly connected to each other. During that process, there are times when they both dream the same dream, live the same life, but there are also times when they separate and have conflicts. Will three decades of attachment help to reduce these conflicts?

Like most of her works, in The Fireflies , Kristin Hannah still shows her special talent in character building and exploiting distinct psychology. With 2 images, she built Tully and Kate as complete opposites, thereby taking readers on 2 different journeys, corresponding to their personalities and choices. While Tully is strong, determined, enthusiastic, aiming for the image of "girl boss" - mastering her own destiny, Kate is more traditional. She is gentle, shy, likes to read romantic novels and when she grows up, she is content with staying at home as a housewife. This shows that the author has focused very deeply on the concept of feminism, when she did not intend to destroy old prejudices to be a "strong woman", because if she is happy with her choice and is free to do so, then at that moment a woman already possesses her own strength.

And through her two characters, horizontally, Hannah has created impressive knots, drawing readers into the main story. In each decade, there are fluctuations in different relationships, such as when they were young, they sneaked out of the house late at night and rode their bikes together. When they went to university, they shared the dream of working in the news industry, and then when they went to work, they had a love triangle with a colleague who was also their boss. When Kate decided to retire to family work, Tully, because of his excessive enthusiasm, interfered in his best friend's family affairs, from which there was a period when the two of them were separated by a deep black hole...

Expanding from two characters, vertically, the author also shows the generation gap between grandmother, mother and daughter. If Tully and Kate were eager to live a free life, eager to grow up, then when having children, Kate imposed exactly what her mother had done to her daughter, sometimes even to the extreme. Through the tense moments of the book, readers will learn the message of what love is, that sometimes you should give the other person their own space. At the end of the work, Kate reconnected with Tully and her daughter after a serious illness with breast cancer. This is also the message Kristin Hannah wants to send to readers, especially female readers, about screening and being more careful with this terrible disease.

The Fireflies' Path published by Lightbooks and Vietnamese Women's Publishing House, translated by Nguyen Thanh Nhan

Historical attraction

In addition to successfully building female characters and the conflicts and knots between them, Kristin Hannah is also very successful in setting the scene. She is considered a master of the historical novel genre, because her works are often set in separate times, thereby showing how they have strongly overcome difficulties. For example, in The Four Winds, she portrayed a strong mother who led her children through the Great Depression of the 1930s in America, while with The Women , she told the story of female nurses who participated in the Vietnam War... These seemingly marginal elements are a characteristic, attracting a lot of attention from the female author.

In The Fireflies, over three decades, we will see important milestones recreated through music, fashion, lifestyle as well as ideology. For example, the 1970s often saw the hippie lifestyle, protests, anti-war music, flared pants fashion... By the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, the book gradually opened up military conflicts stemming from the 9/11 event. By building the characters' careers as journalists and reporters, Hannah also showed that the noble profession of war correspondents always faced danger but also brought the truth out into the world.

And like the 2018 Goncourt Prize-winning novel Their Descendants by Nicolas Mathieu, each chapter of The Fireflies' Path is inspired by famous songs. These songs not only contribute to the details, but if you are also a music lover, the content of the songs also marks important milestones for the characters. From Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Dancing Queen, Material Girl to Bohemian Rhapsody, Purple Rain... thereby bringing a sense of nostalgia to readers of many ages. From this, it can be said that Kristin Hannah is not only a writer about women in different historical moments, but also a very talented writer in evoking nostalgia.

From the above, it is not difficult to understand why Kristin Hannah is always a favorite author of world readers, always awaited every time a new work is released. Her works are full of the flavor of human relationships, set in special contexts, through which always show the strength of women and their efforts to rise above adversity, like the firefly, though small but lighting up the night sky.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/sach-hay-tren-duong-dom-dom-bay-len-185250307204245477.htm