Tunnicliffe (Season of Salt and Honey, 2015, etc.) presents a somewhat predictable but still enjoyable portrait of love,...
A weekend among friends takes a confusing turn when long-simmering issues rise to the surface.
As the cook for former rock star Max Dresner, Juliette certainly sees a lot. When she's asked to serve the guests at his weekendlong birthday celebration at his French country home, she inevitably becomes entwined in their drama and history. For Juliette, this job with Max was meant to serve as a distraction from her past. The opening section of the novel begins two years earlier, when Juliette rushes home to Douarnenez from her busy life in Paris to deal with her ailing parents. She misses out on the opportunity to ensure a rave review of her Parisian restaurant, Delphine, and quickly discovers that the situation with her parents’ health was direr than she anticipated. After they die, she leaves heartbreak and her restaurant behind in Paris to attempt to start anew. Meanwhile, in the present, Max is feeling conflicted over his 40th birthday. His life has veered from its expected path time and time again, and he's still pining over Helen, the woman who stole his heart in college but remained unattainable. At the beginning of a new decade in his life, he's decided that this will be the weekend when he makes his move. Among the other guests at the party, relationships falter and bloom, old wounds are opened, and the weekend irreparably changes how they will forever see one another. The novel’s richest passages are about food and cooking, with particular care taken to describe the kouign-amann, a cake that's the specialty of Juliette’s hometown. Since Juliette struggles between the pull of Paris and her obligation to Douarnenez, a local pastry gaining popularity in the big city serves as an apt metaphor.
Tunnicliffe (Season of Salt and Honey, 2015, etc.) presents a somewhat predictable but still enjoyable portrait of love, friendship, and exquisite cuisine.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54184-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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