Much like a good love song, this story demands to be felt.
A Swedish wedding singer struggles with his love life when his girlfriend moves to America.
J is a “somewhat successful Swedish singer-songwriter. If you live outside of Sweden, it’s unlikely you’ve heard any of his songs on the radio…unless you are one of the bookish, folkish sort who listen to bookish, folkish stations that play bookish, folkish ditties.” Because he wrote a song called “If You Ever Need a Stranger (to Sing at Your Wedding),” he’s started a lucrative side hustle singing at the weddings of mostly strangers (and a few friends). But he’s a unique sort of wedding singer—instead of simply singing covers of popular songs, he writes an original song for each couple. His own love life, though, is complicated. His girlfriend, V, works for a buzzy startup that requires her to move to New York. J, used to being the one who leaves for tours and gigs, is at loose ends without V around, and their communication suffers with an ocean between them. When he gets a wedding gig in New York, he eagerly hops on a plane, only to find that V is not so eager to see him. As his relationship goes through a slow and painful breakdown, J continues playing weddings—some for people who are truly in love, and some for couples whose foundations are built on shaky grounds. Through it all, he keeps writing original songs for each couple, even as the lyrics are suffused with his own heartbreak. The concept is immensely clever: The story is written by Levithan, best known for his YA work, with original songs written by Swedish singer-songwriter Lekman, also a part-time wedding singer—and who actually wrote a song called “If You Ever Need a Stranger (to Sing at Your Wedding).” As J plays wedding after wedding, emotions take center stage. The languid pace fits J’s quest to find out if love really can conquer all, if marriage even matters, and if there’s any hope for his relationship with V.
Much like a good love song, this story demands to be felt.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781419778124
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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
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
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