An insightful and empathetic look at a kind of selflessness that masks cruelty and hypocrisy.
A woman beset by a series of life-altering events moves to Australia to reconnect with her daughter and meet her new granddaughter in Addams’ novel.
Judith Drainger moves from London to Adelaide, Australia, at the age of 59 following two major life changes: the death of her domineering mother, Marigold, and her divorce. It’s a big adjustment, but Judith has been known to make such leaps before—years earlier, she sent her daughter, Cassandra, to boarding school and picked up and moved to Dadaab, Kenya, to work as a volunteer English teacher. A do-gooder by nature (or so it seems), Judith decides it’s time to reconnect with Cassandra, who is now married to an Australian dentist named Andrew. Cassandra has just given birth to a daughter of her own, and Judith is convinced she needs her help. When Judith arrives, Cassandra reacts coolly to her mother’s intrusion and Judith struggles to hide her judgment of her daughter’s decisions, her weight, and her husband. The colorful cast of characters includes the busybody Martha Thompson and her philandering husband, Paul; their delinquent foster son, Billy; and the curmudgeonly, old next-door neighbor, Gladys, whom Judith also decides to help. Addams’ novel is an effective character study of Judith, whose altruism hides a sense of self-importance and a tendency toward selfishness. The dialogue is sharp and subtle—there’s a moment when Cassandra denigrates Judith’s new home (as a “horrible cottage”) that seems to suggest some deeper underlying tensions stemming from being carted off to boarding school while her mother left to work in Kenya—and Addams’ prose is capable and direct. While there are a lot of moving pieces in the novel, including Judith’s own strained relationship with her mother, the narrative strands effectively come together to convey an affecting family drama about the ways in which people overstep their boundaries, or neglect them entirely, under the veneer of saintliness.
An insightful and empathetic look at a kind of selflessness that masks cruelty and hypocrisy.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781962931175
Page Count: 266
Publisher: High Frequency Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2025
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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