Domestic drama with an offbeat, rural flavor.
A man heads from LA to his native Australia to check on his ailing mother and ends up refereeing a host of domestic squabbles instead.
Daniel, the narrator of Francis’ likable if unpolished third novel (Stray Dog Winter, 2009, etc.), is a lawyer planning a comfortable Christmas with his new girlfriend, Isabel, when his mother, Ruthie, calls from rural southeast Australia saying she’ll be “dead as Dickens by the end of the year.” Upon his arrival, though, it’s clear mom lured him back to help with disarray on the homestead. Ruthie has long been estranged from Daniel’s philandering father, Earley, who has stoked enough jealousy and anger in a tenant, Sharen, that she set fire to a car on the property. All three have gathered up a generation or two’s worth of resentments, and the place is feral: Sharen keeps a horse in a spare room in her cottage, and Sharen’s son, Reggie, openly spies on Daniel. But Francis proves that this reckless landscape also has a darkly seductive pull, underscored by Daniel’s growing attraction to Sharen, an attractive pot-smoking free spirit. Their ill-advised and speedy fling (the novel takes place over the course of a week) is the novel’s main energy source, to the point where other elements pale in comparison. Earley and the other locals are relatively distant figures (Isabel commands a lot of the word count but plays a minor role), and while Reggie owns the stage in the brief interludes he narrates, the threats of the arrival of his father on the scene don’t amount to much. Ultimately this is a conventional midlife crisis tale, but one bolstered by Francis’ sharp language about a landscape where “death and hardship are passed off...like so many handkerchiefs, laughed away with a weary acceptance.”
Domestic drama with an offbeat, rural flavor.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-787-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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