A shining exploration of human frailty and endurance falters when it attempts social analysis.
A 44-year-old woman comes to terms with her life while attending an annual corporate banquet.
Software analyst Trisha Donahue always relished the annual boozy parties thrown at the Rose & Emerald restaurant in central Massachusetts by the Boston company where she’s worked for eight years. But new management runs the company with a more corporate ethos, and speechifying has replaced drinking alcohol, no longer allowed, at the now unofficially mandatory banquets. Having learned that she’s been passed over for a promotion she was all but promised, Trisha is a reluctant attendee this year. Then she’s stunned, not in a good way, when management announces to the crowd that she’s the first woman “Employee of the Year.” Trisha flees within the passageways of the almost magically charming Rose & Emerald, located (perhaps too) coincidentally in the community where she grew up “on the wrong side of the tracks.” While Cooney effectively draws peripheral characters like Trisha’s privileged yet self-aware husband and her stoic, ailing boss, the only character that truly matters here is Trisha. As she struggles through this one crazy day, she reviews her evolution from a working-class girl with brains and ambition to a woman afraid to rock the status quo. The depiction of Trisha’s middle-class financial anxiety is spot-on, but Cooney lays on the sociopolitical critique with a heavy hand. Trisha so relentlessly complains about blockheaded bosses and bemoans turning “corporate” that the good reasons she’s angry become boring. The novel’s explorations of class inequality and corporate mentality seldom reach beyond the obvious, and its perspective on society’s unfair treatment of women seems dated—Trisha has no awareness of the #MeToo movement, and her thoughts on what clothes a successful woman needs, including pantyhose, feel anachronistic. But Cooney is remarkably adept at capturing minute inner crises within an individual and the imperfect but real connections between people. While the writing can be pessimistic, even cynical, neither Cooney nor her central character is afraid to look kindness in the face when it arises. No mean feat.
A shining exploration of human frailty and endurance falters when it attempts social analysis.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781566896719
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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