An intriguing but slow-moving emotional drama.
In this novel, a young woman wrestles with the death of her older brother and gets lost in a shapeless ennui.
Eleanor Lihte encounters tragedy as a young girl—her older brother, Jamie, dies in a car accident when he is only 18 years old. As a result, her own life becomes entrapped in a state of permanent shiftlessness—she is overcome by boredom and an aching loneliness. Her family manages the tragedy through a studied silence and, in the case of her mother, a cruel incomprehension and lack of empathy for Eleanor’s own suffering: “You’ve always been such a sweet girl. I don’t understand why things have been so hard for you.” When Eleanor is not working as a lifeguard, an uninspiring job—she and her peers are “more like seminude janitors than heroes”—she spends her time sewing and crying. She finally musters enough energy to move from California to Arizona in order to study to become a teacher, but she continues to find the purpose of existence bewildering and to feel that her life is a failure. Nevertheless, Eleanor is reluctant to return to her “tiny homeland, the world of limited possibilities she knew,” and seeks out counsel from various figures, including a born-again spiritual guru, a psychic, and, finally, a therapist.
Toy intelligently conveys Eleanor’s emotional desolation and her benumbed inability to feel pleasure. But the author’s writing sometimes strains too laboriously for lyrical heights and instead achieves a curious eccentricity: “One Sunday sitting at her roommate’s kitchen table waiting for her mother to call,” Eleanor “read a book about evolution. She was hoping to evolve—to become a scaled amphibian heading back toward the water or a bright yellow duck.” The plot is as sluggish as the protagonist—not much happens, which of course makes sense given the morbid torpor that infects Eleanor. Toy’s prose deftly captures her languor—it even parallels it—but the result is sometimes closer to a portrait of melancholy than an engaging story. Still, readers will empathize with Eleanor as she deals with a soporific lethargy. Yet sometimes that tedium is broken with gibberish. Consider this excerpt from a letter Eleanor writes to a former teacher: “I am writing not only to apologize, but to offer you the combination that will unleash the ringing sound inside my telephone. You forgot, I am sure, to ask for it. You are forgetting also, I am sure, to ask when I am coming to visit. Unfortunately, I am tied to my supply of French fries and white bread and will not be coming soon.” Eleanor finally begins to recover from her lassitude, partly as a result of therapy, and comes to grip with the human condition she previously resisted. Her ultimate revelation, though, seems a bit trite—she finds solace in recognizing that others are far more “dysfunctional” than she is.
An intriguing but slow-moving emotional drama.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-60489-301-4
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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