While Quindlen may lean too hard on the hope motif at the end, this is an emotionally satisfying, absorbing story.
When the title character dies suddenly of an aneurysm, her husband, four children and best friend must deal with their grief and find a path forward.
Annie Fonzheimer grew up in small-town Greengrass, Pennsylvania, and never left. She married “too fast and too young” when she got pregnant by local boy Bill Brown, a plumber by trade. Annie works long hours as an aide at a nursing home and tends to her four children, ages 6 to 13, in a small house that belongs to her mother-in-law, the prickly Dora. But Annie, high-spirited and much adored, is content with her “lovely reliable” life, even if it’s not exactly what she’d expected. She’s a vibrant presence in this novel, despite getting bumped off in the first sentence. Quindlen weaves Annie’s backstory with an account of her survivors, who suffer mightily in her absence. Without her mother, eldest child Ali watches over her younger siblings and navigates a friendship with a girl who harbors a disturbing secret. Best pal Annemarie, whom Annie helped save from drug addition, must decide if she can persevere without her friend’s steadying hand. And Bill, who wasn’t sure about marrying Annie at first—and then found he couldn’t imagine life without her—must sort out his feelings for a woman he was involved with before his wife. Quindlen, whose own mother died when she was 19, is good at this sort of domestic drama, elevating material that might seem over-familiar, even maudlin in other hands; the well-drawn characters and sharp observations keep the reader engaged. “Maybe grief was like homesickness,” Bill muses at one point, “something that wasn’t just about a specific person, but about losing that feeling that you were where you belonged….” Actually, not a lot happens until the novel’s final section, in which, arguably, too much happens.
While Quindlen may lean too hard on the hope motif at the end, this is an emotionally satisfying, absorbing story.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593229804
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
