Long in the telling, but a lively portrait of familial, cultural, and amorous entanglements.
An expansive, complex tale of three sisters and the swath they cut across the world.
Scene: a New Year’s Eve party in Stockholm, where Ina Mikkola meets a young man named Hector. Ina has two sisters there, Anastasia and Evelyn, but she doesn’t want to find them, lest Hector “fall in love with Anastasia, the fun sister, the crazy sister…[and then] he would catch sight of Evelyn and then he would quickly let go of Anastasia’s hand and become transfixed by Evelyn’s eyes.” And so it goes over the 650 pages of Swedish novelist Khemiri’s latest, an ambitious epic that spans half a century and crosses oceans to find—well, never exactly happiness, since the sisters believe they’re doomed by a curse never to find it. An interlocutor throughout is a young man named Jonas, who, like the Mikkola sisters, is half Swedish and half Tunisian: He reveals himself as a purveyor of rumors about them (“their mom worked late and on weekends and wore a lot of perfume and black leather boots and always had her designer handbag full of cash”), befitting of the later role that Jonas plays—not just an observer, but in time a perhaps unreliable narrator within the narration, organized, as Jonas says, just as Khemiri’s is, in seven parts, “and each part covers a shorter and shorter period of time, from a year down to a minute.” It’s a daring concept, but Khemiri pulls it off capably, with that last minute containing an especially moving episode. The longer pieces have their longueurs, with Anastasia, drug-addled and lost, taking much of the story’s oxygen, but each part offers a tantalizing bit of a secret that the reader must pursue to the end in order to understand just how Jonas’ story intertwines with the Mikkolas’, even as their lives have over decades.
Long in the telling, but a lively portrait of familial, cultural, and amorous entanglements.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780374618896
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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