A fun, sun-drenched homage to camp memories.
Estranged best friends reunite for one last summer at their beloved camp.
Jessie Pederson and Hillary Goldberg spent their childhoods waiting all year to get back to summer camp. Camp Chickawah was where Jessie found a home in the midst of her parents’ divorce and where Hillary could finally be herself. But most importantly, they had each other, and they were going to be camp counselors together…until Hillary took a job opportunity that her father thought was a better fit, leaving Jessie alone at camp. Hillary grew into a successful consultant, while Jessie worked her way up to camp director. Now, Jessie gets the bad news that Camp Chickawah is about to be sold, and she’s devastated. She decides to give the camp one last hurrah, inviting former campers back for an adult summer session that will celebrate everything that made her favorite place so special. Hillary comes back to run the arts and crafts program and to try to rekindle her friendship with Jessie. As the two of them work together, they realize that their friendship never really died. There are also romantic sparks with returning campers. Hillary reconnects with the cook, Cooper, who was her first kiss. And Jessie is in turns infuriated and intrigued by Luke, the grumpy novelist who’s there to work on his book. As the summer goes on, Hillary and Jessie start to wonder if they might be able to keep the camp—as well as their renewed friendship and their budding romances—going. Brady, the author team behind beach reads like The Comeback Summer (2023), creates a nostalgic and entertaining look at camp life. Jessie and Hillary both have satisfying character arcs, and it’s especially nice to see Jessie begin to realize that camp isn’t the only good thing in her life. While the romances have their steamy moments, this story is ultimately proof that platonic soulmates are just as important as romantic ones.
A fun, sun-drenched homage to camp memories.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593640821
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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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