A perceptive novel about human connection that sometimes gets lost in its own thoughts.
A grieving graphic designer forms a unique bond with a depressed neighbor in Rossman’s debut novel.
It’s been a year and a half since Owen and Janey Conway’s son, Aaron, died. To deal with his grief, Owen has been attending a support group called SOS. He’s also interested in a neighbor named Wilson Lacy, a retired scientist and teacher. Owen barely knows him, but he’s seen him tooling around the neighborhood in his 1950s sports car. Because Owen is sad, he’s drawn to what he senses is Wilson’s sadness, so he approaches his neighbor with a proposal. Owen’s a graphic designer, and he wonders if Wilson might want to take part in a project involving seven photographs, carefully chosen to represent significant points in the neighbor’s lifetime. Wilson, whose wife has recently left him due to his depression, agrees to the plan. “Maybe he was beginning to see something else in his photographs that could be used to shed some light on his darkness—and that glimmer moved him with an amalgam of desperation and hope,” narrates Owen. His plan involves what he calls “visual literacy” (“The idea is that there is meaning engraved in all visual images”), and he presents the project to Wilson as a kind of science experiment. Then Sophie, the hostess at the local pub, enters the picture; Owen introduces her to Wilson without fully realizing the effect that she might have. Rossman’s novel about grief and its aftermath is truly heartfelt in its execution. Over the course of the story, the author clearly describes his protagonist’s complicated thought processes as he wades through grief on the way to acceptance. The characters are all thoughtful people who are clearly interested in finding answers to hard questions, and Rossman elegantly expresses Owen’s efforts to connect with a possibly kindred soul. The novel is long-winded, however, and the dense prose can make some of the book’s loftier concepts a bit hard to grasp. An extensive epilogue with photographs provides helpful insights, but other parts of the story remain hazy.
A perceptive novel about human connection that sometimes gets lost in its own thoughts.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6531-6
Page Count: 354
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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