Transforming the odd and the homely into something beautiful is both the subject and the accomplishment of this book.
When a woman is left a roomful of giant metal artworks by her long-estranged stepmother, a journey begins.
Both characters who narrate this inspiring novel, spare yet packed with plot and ideas, are from a tiny fictional town in the southern Allegheny Mountains. Jean was married to Leah's father until Leah was 10, when their flourishing bond was severed by divorce. In her 60s, living in the house she grew up in, Jean taught herself welding from YouTube videos and began making towers out of sheet metal, decorating them with oddments trapped in little vitrines and quotes like "I WANT TO BELIEVE IN SOLITUDE AND THE GLORY OF MY INNER HORSEFACE, DON'T YOU?" Inspired by the work and writings of Louise Bourgeois, Jean had "no nerve in the morning if [she] skipped [her] nightly Louise," who "made art seem like something any obsessive loner who craved it could achieve." Leah, Jean's one-time stepdaughter, left town long ago, moving to Peru after college, eventually returning to settle in New York with her husband, Gerardo, and son, Silvestre. As the book opens, she is on her way home for the first time in years, having gotten a call from a man who was living with Jean at the time of her death. It's not an easy journey, with the GPS cutting out in rural Pennsylvania and her Spanish-speaking family receiving hostile attention at a gas station festooned with flags. When they get to Jean's, they find a broken-down neighborhood, a scary man with no front teeth, and what Jean referred to as her Manglements. The end of the book comes in a rush as Novey does the metaphorical equivalent of what Jean saw a man doing at the flea market. "He was shifting the height of the shelf and the glass jars to best catch the sunlight moving through his marbles and the pockets of air between them. After his next tweak, a jar of translucent green marbles caught the light in such a divine way the marbles lit up from within." "That’s Art," Jean tells him. "You made it happen, thank you."
Transforming the odd and the homely into something beautiful is both the subject and the accomplishment of this book.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-59-365285-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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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