As much fun as you’ll ever have with middle-aged marriage and ecoterrorism.
When dinner at California’s fanciest restaurant turns into a hostage situation…
Oakley loves an unlikely premise, but she’s outdone herself in her sixth novel, reviving the ambitions of her failed-novelist heroine with a truly wild series of events. The book is set during a single evening at an ultra-high-end restaurant called La Fin du Monde, located on a California coastal cliff. Its “million-dollar view” is upstaged by its $8.4 million dessert, which includes a diamond bracelet “and has famously been ordered only once, by a New York Yankees player for his wife, the week after his sext messages with a Southwest flight attendant went viral.” (Funny, culturally clued-in asides are thick on the ground.) Jane and Dan end up celebrating their 19th anniversary at this palace of excess when he wins a voucher he thinks is for a free dinner but actually only entitles him to make a reservation. Sadly, Jane’s planning to ask him for a divorce, partly because of some texts she saw on his phone but more because she’s just so bored with her life. But the boredom’s about to be over. Dan and Jane are barely through their first course (claw-shaped seafood concoctions that look “like they harvested them out of Sigourney Weaver’s stomach”) when a bunch of people in masks carrying assault rifles pour into the dining room. “Jane is no gun expert, but she did research various military-grade weapons when she was writing her novel Tea Is for Terror, about an evil gang taking over a high-end teahouse in London and holding everyone hostage and oh dear God.” Yes, somehow the leader of the climate activists is one of the six people who read Jane’s novel—and the evening has many other surprises in store. Though the change in temperature of Jane and Dan’s marriage is not the biggest one, it’s nonetheless relatable and sweet. (Perhaps Oakley is celebrating the 24th anniversary of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, which also includes a love story? Fans of that book will enjoy the connection.)
As much fun as you’ll ever have with middle-aged marriage and ecoterrorism.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593200827
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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