A smart, funny, and sneakily terrifying version of the way we live now. (Do not read without working air conditioning.)
In the throes of a sanity-destroying summer, a Toronto woman explores a dangerous new hobby.
It’s not just hot, it’s an “end-of-days climate that increasingly resembled an Old Testament Hell.” In fact, thinks Beatrice Billings, “It could rain frogs now and humanity would take it in stride….Oh, it’s always rained frogs....She knew our Saviour had thrown in the towel and gone back to His golf game, and knew that mankind deserved to be punished. Certainly Bea deserved it.” Why does Bea, a 49-year-old Toronto art dealer with a son in college and a shaky marriage, think she deserves punishment? It begins on just another day she’s stuck in her empty gallery feeling lonely, bored, stressed out, and claustrophobic. She Googles “escape.” One video later, she’s sending away for a lock-picking kit. Not long after, she joins a lock-picking club; turns out, she’s very good at it. Next thing she knows, she's trailing a woman who’s just paid cash for a $1,500 dress. She returns to the woman’s home the next day, gets in fairly easily, and leaves with a rich store of knowledge about the lives of this woman and her husband—and also the dress. It doesn’t stop there for Bea, though after the first time, stealing isn’t part of the routine. She does tend to leave marks of her uninvited visits, at one house typing a Descartes joke into a crappy philosophy manuscript and, at another, phoning in a tip to a suicide hotline. Gillmor does an impressive job of keeping Bea not just sympathetic but even normal-seeming as this outlandish summer progresses. She does all she can for her mother, who’s in memory care; she’s patient with her annoying sister, who has lots of opinions while not contributing at all; she misses her son, whose presence in her life has been reduced to infrequent texts, not to mention her husband, who’s drifted as far from her as she has from him. As for breaking and entering? The genius of this book is to capture the exact way a familiar world of aging parents and divorcing friends and nice charcuterie platters could go right around the bend. Oh, you know, it’s always rained frogs.
A smart, funny, and sneakily terrifying version of the way we live now. (Do not read without working air conditioning.)Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781771965231
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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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