A sharp, suspenseful portrait of a family on the verge of collapse.
Elise Sorenson has worked hard in hopes of someday making the Olympic dressage team. At last her dream beckons, but her ambition may destroy her marriage.
Matt Sorenson was raised by his grandfather Nate, who warned him against marrying Elise, a woman he saw as too driven to be a good wife. Cohen (The Search Angel, 2013, etc.) heartbreakingly spins out the dire consequences of Nate’s prophecy, as Elise seems to be punished at every turn. Her career comes at the price of a faltering marriage—her long absences limit Matt’s own career options and push him to assume both parents’ roles for their daughter, Gracie, who has cerebral palsy due to Elise’s fall from a horse while 31 weeks pregnant. And Nate’s disapproval always made her feel like an outsider at the Sorensons’ family cabin on Lake Placid—a home Matt plans to sell to invest in his law partnership. Unfortunately, he now feels compelled to use the proceeds to fund Elise’s Olympic bid. When the family heads north to get the cabin ready to go on the market, Matt quickly rekindles his friendship with the voluptuous Cass, his first love, who now lives next door. But as Matt repairs the cabin, he recognizes the gaps that separate him from the town—the men repairing his roof may remember Nate as a financial savior, but they see Matt as a privileged Manhattan attorney, an outsider. Then Gracie disappears and the Sorenson family splinters, as Cohen smartly sets each character’s crisis on a collision course with the others. Caught between her equestrian dreams and her suspicions about Cass, Elise risks losing everything. Even Gracie, with her hopes to be like other kids, risks too much. And as the summer progresses, Matt realizes that Nate’s legacy may be much darker than he remembers.
A sharp, suspenseful portrait of a family on the verge of collapse.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9968-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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