A somber, slow-moving coming-of-age tale.
Two young men furtively seek connection and an escape from their disappointed fathers.
Malaysian author Aw’s fifth novel is a melancholy remembrance of a summer spent in the southern reaches of that South Asian country. The family of the narrator of much of the novel, Jay, has learned that they’re set to inherit a small patch of land there. It’s managed by a caretaker named Fong, though there’s not much to manage, just a few trees bearing little fruit, on “twenty hectares of scrubby jungle and farmland”; however, 16-year-old Jay is instantly enchanted with Fong’s son, Chuan. Over the course of the summer, Jay helps clear the land but mostly keeps Chuan company by swimming and drinking with him as they slowly grow ever closer. Meanwhile, Jay’s older sisters clue Jay into his parents’ collapsing marriage, which is a mismatch on a number of levels; Jack is a foursquare mathematics teacher, while Sui is more emotional and from a lower-class background. As the boys look for opportunities to elude their parents’ criticism, Aw writes gracefully and sensually about Jay’s ever-intensifying desires for sex and independence—in many ways the story echoes the lush, erotic tone of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. And Aw’s visions of the surroundings are effectively complex, at once rich yet bleached out, Edenic yet touched with dread. (Always lyrical, though: “Dusk was falling and the evening sky behind him was flecked with bats and swifts returning from the river nearby.”) But despite its themes of sex, betrayal, masculinity, queerness, and property, the novel as a whole feels oddly static, built on elegantly written sections but never placing Jay in situations that feel particularly tense. The boys’ craving new lives for themselves is intriguing, but Aw’s treatment is stubbornly restrained.
A somber, slow-moving coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9780374616281
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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