In this odd and lovely story, Jewell makes believable the connection between these strangers, bound by biology and longing.
Filled with heart and humor, this latest from British bestseller Jewell raises all those big questions about identity, family and fitting in.
What if your father was a sperm donor and you had unknown siblings out there. Would you want to know them? This is the question three Londoners have to confront in this poignant novel. Twenty-nine-year-old Lydia lives in a mansion in St. John’s Wood thanks to a clever chemical invention she sold for millions. She lives a minimal existence with minimalist furniture (plus a cat, housekeeper and personal trainer so perfect-looking he must be gay). This shiny life does little to make up for the wretchedness of her poor Welsh childhood: Her mother, Glenys, used a sperm donor when she sensed her macho husband, Trevor, was infertile, but after her mysterious death, Trevor despised the daughter he suspected wasn’t his. Out of the blue, Lydia receives an anonymous package that tells her she was conceived by a sperm donor—shocking yet somehow vindicating news; she never felt she belonged. She finds a website that tracks donor siblings and there discovers Dean and Robyn. Dean is a 21-year-old sad sack and screw-up. After his girlfriend dies giving birth to their daughter, Dean’s response is to run from the hospital and get high. But in his ongoing stupor, he does manage to get on the donor sibling registry and finds Lydia. The two meet—both loners in possession of startling good looks—and feel immediately at home. Last in line is Robyn who, unlike Dean and Lydia, has two loving parents and a happy life (she’s a gorgeous med student) but is driven to the registry because she has an irrational fear that her boyfriend—soul mate really—may be her brother. Meanwhile, a man is dying in a hospice, wishing he had made more of his life and confessing to his friend that he has children out there—children she could find for him.
In this odd and lovely story, Jewell makes believable the connection between these strangers, bound by biology and longing.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0911-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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