A tighter focus on fewer characters than the earlier installments (Bertie Plays the Blues, 2013, etc.) doesn’t pay off in...
An eighth season of charmingly featherweight escapades, moral dilemmas, and errors committed and corrected and sometimes simply brushed aside by the denizens of 44 Scotland St. and its Edinburgh environs.
Miraculously, anthropologist Domenica Macdonald succeeds in marrying painter Angus Lordie even though Angus has made no arrangements for a wedding ring or a honeymoon or the gaping hole in the kilt he plans to wear. No sooner has the happy couple taken their vows than the best man, gallery owner Matthew Harmony, is approached by Bo, a filmmaker who’s a friend of his triplets’ au pair, Anna, who wants to film a fly-on-the-wall documentary of Matthew’s absolutely normal family, which he’s convinced Danish audiences will love. Bertie Pollock, the 6-year-old to whom Angus entrusts his beloved dog, Cyril, while he’s away, has to deal with the fact that his mother, Irene, doesn’t want a dog in the house. Convinced that something ails Cyril, she starts him in psychotherapy, and Bertie contemplates protective measures that are bound to backfire. Bertie’s father, Stuart, inches closer to confronting his misgivings about the uncanny resemblance of his baby son Ulysses’ ears to those of his wife’s former therapist, Dr. Hugo Fairbairn, now prudently decamped to Aberdeen. And in the most inventive of the plots that swirl and churn and then dissolve, narcissistic surveyor Bruce Anderson meets his exact physical double, a man who would certainly be his long-lost twin brother if he had one, and Jonathan proposes a mad scheme Bruce unaccountably accepts.
A tighter focus on fewer characters than the earlier installments (Bertie Plays the Blues, 2013, etc.) doesn’t pay off in additional depth or sharper conflict but generates more serial complications per capita for a crew that’s endlessly open to adventures while remaining immitigably themselves.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-80440-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. 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. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. 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. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. 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. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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