A frustratingly sentimental depiction of adolescence and American counterculture.
An adolescent girl comes of age in this nostalgic novel of 1970s Baltimore.
In the summer of 1975, nothing has stopped earnest 14-year-old Mary Jane Dillard from loyally accepting her strict Presbyterian mother’s beliefs about what it means to be a well-behaved young woman. Her familiar world turns upside down, however, when she begins nannying for the Cones, an unconventional family made up of Dr. Cone, a psychiatrist, Mrs. Cone, a housewife who—scandalously—doesn’t cook or clean, and Izzy, their winsome daughter. Mary Jane quickly becomes an integral component of the Cone household, not only taking care of Izzy, but also cooking and cleaning for the family. When Dr. Cone welcomes two top-secret guests—a rock star recovering from drug addiction and his movie-star wife—to the household, Mary Jane finds herself getting an unexpected but thrilling crash course in music, fame, sex, and the adult world…one that she’s inevitably forced to hide from her conservative parents. Blau paints an overly rosy picture of Mary Jane’s coming-of-age: Though the book nominally engages with weighty topics including addiction, adultery, and racism, it fails to seriously reckon with them or with the complex and often ugly history of America in the 1970s. The novel’s countercultural setting is, regrettably, mere window dressing. Though Mary Jane’s desire to escape her parents’ oppressive home is understandable, Blau never critically interrogates the Cones’ extreme openness, particularly about sex, which is also inappropriate given the fact that Mary Jane is only 14. With the exception of some clunky dialogue, Blau’s novel is readable and modestly entertaining, and readers nostalgic for the rock-and-roll scene of the '70s will likely enjoy its depiction of a wayward star, but it never dares to ask difficult questions.
A frustratingly sentimental depiction of adolescence and American counterculture.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-305229-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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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