After her realistic examination of new motherhood and marital strain, Weiner pulls her punches with a too-neat ending.
Weiner (Good in Bed, 2001; In Her Shoes, 2002) follows four Philadelphia women as they face the challenges, from trivial to profound, of new motherhood, becoming friends in the process.
Becky, Kelly, and Ayinde meet at a pregnancy yoga class. At the same time, Lia, an actress who has returned home to Philly to come to grips with her baby’s death, begins following Becky around and leaving her baby gifts (Weiner overlooks the stalker-creepiness of this behavior) until she joins the friendship circle as a kind of emotional counterweight to keep the others’ problems in perspective. In Weiner’s symmetry, each woman starts out with an issue and each faces a challenge. Lia’s challenge is obviously her loss; her underlying issue is her mother’s emotional coldness. Becky’s issue is weight. A restaurant owner married to a nice Jewish doctor, Becky’s challenge is her obnoxious, overbearing mother-in-law. Overachieving Kelly’s issue is the poverty she has overcome. An event planner who has orchestrated her life for maximum security, Kelly is thrown a curve when her husband gets laid off from his corporate job and becomes a couch potato. For Ayinde, beautiful and from a privileged background as the daughter of an actor and a model, being biracial has been a lifelong struggle. Now her basketball star husband is slapped with a paternity suit by another woman. But love conquers all. Becky’s husband miraculously grows a spine and quits being a mama’s boy. Kelly and her husband learn to communicate and support each other in following their real professional dreams. Ayinde’s husband proves he is a devoted father, and his former paramour visits Ayinde to assure her how much he really loves Ayinde. Lia finds peace with her loss, realizes that her mother has always loved her, and reunites with her husband.
After her realistic examination of new motherhood and marital strain, Weiner pulls her punches with a too-neat ending.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-7009-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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