A moving story of friendship, family, and recovery.
In Peters’ novel, two very different Illinois women find unexpected strength and grace in each other.
Two months after her father dies, 53-year-old white Midwesterner Pauline Swanson becomes a hospice volunteer, thinking she can use the skills she learned while caring for him to help others. A sober alcoholic with no remaining family, she works as a bartender, lives frugally, and is consumed by regret about her behavior when she was young and troubled. Her first patient is Deborah “DeeDee” Deneaux, a 76-year-old Black businesswoman who has an advanced, incurable autoimmune disease. DeeDee initially rejects help, and she has a difficult relationship with her resentful son, Raymond, who arranged the hospice visits. Pauline persists, and as the two women get to know each other better, a true friendship blooms. Pauline is awed by DeeDee’s story of growing up in a close-knit family in New Orleans in the 1960s, training as a dancer, then going to San Francisco at age 18 with her brother, who joined the Black Panthers. Barely able to make rent as a diner waitress, DeeDee became an exotic dancer and stripper, then put herself through college as a single working mother. She tells her story proudly, which is a revelation to Pauline, who holds back details of her own past, due to feelings of shame. When DeeDee pleads for Pauline to take her out for one last night on the town, she reluctantly agrees, despite her worries about DeeDee’s weakening condition. Not long afterward, Pauline gets an unexpected reminder of a childhood trauma, and she faces a gut-wrenching decision.
The novel interweaves Pauline’s first-person, present-tense story and DeeDee’s, told in third person, past tense. Both women’s voices effectively convey their strong personalities; Pauline’s directness is often disconcerting to others, although her thoughts are much snarkier than her speech. DeeDee centers her New Orleans Creole heritage, sprinkling conversations with dawlin’ and bits of French; she affectionately calls Pauline “mon cygne.” Peters’ writing features apt descriptions—the senior living apartment building where DeeDee resides has “a cozy, almost Victorian vibe with a hint of Howard Johnson’s”—and lovely passages, as when Pauline imagines her own ashes after death: “I will dust the dreams of lovers, be a mote in the eyes of those who hate, grit the icy walkways to steady slippery steps, and choke the voices that lie and slander.” The characters are well-rounded and distinct; they’re sometimes blind to their own feelings but psychologically astute about others’; for example, DeeDee tells Pauline that Raymond “doesn’t so much try to mean well, as he likes to feel as if he tries to mean well.” The novel handles weighty themes frankly and with nuance, as when Pauline asks DeeDee how she survived racism and prejudice, and she replies, “Getting a kick out of your past-tense there, dawlin’.” Although her body is weakening, DeeDee remains as vibrant as ever, while Pauline’s perseverance, and her journey toward love and self-acceptance, are memorable throughout. A moving story of friendship, family, and recovery.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798998588402
Page Count: 504
Publisher: SmallPub
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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