An abundance of good writing and interesting storylines and environmental information, but not much to tie it together.
In the wake of their mother’s death, a Florida family regroups.
Strong’s fourth novel, set over two recent summer months in a wealthy area of Florida, is defined by an unusual decision: The third-oldest of the four Kenner siblings, Jude, is its omniscient narrator. At one point, there is a parenthetical acknowledgement of how weird this is: “A lot of what I’m saying here I found out later; the rest, as Fred would say, I’ve imagined my way into, because why not.” The reason Fred, short for Winnifred, would say this is that she, the second child, is the writer in the family, and her published books have been the source of difficulty and estrangement. With the story she tells here, Jude is effectively taking back the narrative, describing Fred’s (and everyone else’s) experiences in Florida so intimately that one has to keep reminding oneself that this is Jude’s story and trying to recall which woman goes with which husband or ex-husband, etc., and that Jude is largely offstage in New York. As the novel opens, the children’s mother has had a stroke while running and died two days later. Jude and her youngest sibling, George, come to town for the funeral; George remains at their parents’ house for the rest of the novel. One of the things Jude “found out later” is why he didn’t want to go home to Houston. Another such thing is that at the “party that was not a party” after the funeral, Fred found a gun in their mother’s dresser drawer. The story of this gun, both in the past and the present, is the closest thing the novel has to a throughline, and the suspicion that it must at some point be discharged proves true. Every one of the many characters, including the dead mother, has backstories and subplots and friends and associates. Threaded through it all is bad news about the Floridian landscape and climate that plays little role in the plot.
An abundance of good writing and interesting storylines and environmental information, but not much to tie it together.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780063390737
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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