A powerful exploration of artistic ambition, deception, and redemption.
Aspiring journalist Violet Maris embarks on an audacious scheme that threatens to unravel her identity in Wald’s novel.
Violet Maris, a 26-year-old journalist, sees an opportunity for a groundbreaking exposé when she learns about The Home, a prestigious artists’ residency in Provincetown that may not be all that it seems. Since journalists aren’t admitted, she goes undercover and submits her mentor Spencer Bayrose’s unpublished stories as her own. With his approval, she secures a prestigious fellowship and enters the insular world of The Home. There, she encounters a diverse group of artists, forming tentative bonds with fellow “verbals” (writers) and “visuals” (painters and sculptors), including the sensitive poet Cordelia, the blunt fiction writer Phrank, and the captivating Jeanette. Despite her initial skepticism, she becomes immersed in the creative energy of The Home, a place where ambition clashes with creativity. But her deception weighs heavily on her, especially as she grows close to Gene Pelletier, a board member she lied to about her intentions to report on the retreat. Her secret is further complicated by Spencer’s declining health. After his death from AIDS, Violet is left to confront her grief while carrying the weight of her deception. The novel’s introspective first-person narration allows readers to fully immerse themselves in Violet’s perspective. Provincetown’s setting comes to life with its seaside, bohemian vibes and vibrant energy (“The weather, while not as frigid as it was on the mainland, had a soul-chilling quality that made you feel a bit bipolar—alternately anxious and elated. My own moods, in fact, did vacillate between the two”). Sharp dialogue, like Gene Pelletier’s guarded remark about The Home’s privacy, adds depth to the story (“Miss Maris…I doubt any of them would want to participate in anything like that. It’s kind of a private space for us, you know. Everybody’s there to work on their art”). As Violet balances her growing attachment to The Home with the guilt of her deceit, the novel builds toward an inevitable reckoning. The lies that once felt so clever now feel suffocating, and the price of her ambition may be more than she anticipated.
A powerful exploration of artistic ambition, deception, and redemption.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781646035953
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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