Jenny’s decision will come as no surprise, but this debut novel offers credible descriptions of first-time motherhood,...
Ditched by her partner right before she gives birth, a young mother must decide whether to take him back or give a new love interest.
In the realm of adult responsibilities, Houstonian Jenny Harris knows her fiancé, Dean Murphy, comes up short. A retirement-benefits analyst who performs in a half-baked cover band, Dean still receives monthly checks from his well-heeled parents, smokes more than he should and moons over other women. He meets Jenny, in fact, while chasing a friend of hers, but when that doesn’t pan out, they settle into a live-in relationship, and he proposes marriage. Getting pregnant before the wedding, Jenny frets about Dean’s ambivalence toward impending fatherhood, especially after his peculiar response to a pretty coworker’s death. While Jenny quits her job at an antiques store and organizes a garage sale to prepare for their child, Dean clings to band practice and gigs at local dives. One night he walks out, leaving her with a breakup note and a baby due any minute. Daughter Maxie brings unexpected joys and burdens, which newly single Jenny shoulders with the support of her divorced parents, best friend Meredith, other mothers from her childbirth class and an attractive neighbor named John Gardner. A pediatric nephrologist who has taken up renovating and selling houses, John has an uncanny knack for appearing when Jenny needs him most. Nurturing, attentive and good with Maxie, he keeps Jenny company in a blackout and paints her garage when she decides to start an antiques business. His unobtrusive courtship culminates in an evening of margaritas and salsa dancing. But then Dean returns, seeking reconciliation.
Jenny’s decision will come as no surprise, but this debut novel offers credible descriptions of first-time motherhood, affecting characters and situations and low-key charm.Pub Date: June 26, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6637-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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