A story of catastrophic loss that fails to stand out from the crowded field of books on grief.
A woman mourning the losses of her husband and young daughter goes on a cross-country road trip to rediscover her faith.
Kuder’s debut novel tells the story of Ali Berg, who has just suffered the losses of her husband, Isaac, and their teenage daughter, Zoe, in a car accident. Supported by her loving parents and siblings, Ali decides to go on a road trip to meet up with people from her past she is grateful for, hoping that the journey will help her remember what makes her life worth continuing. The novel also cuts from Ali’s present journey to her past with Isaac and Zoe, demonstrating the imperfect but ultimately loving nature of their relationship. Kuder has crafted a meaningful exploration into some of the difficulties of grief and a brave protagonist whom readers can root for as she travels. Unfortunately, though, many of the characters resemble mouthpieces for specific philosophies and perspectives on grieving more than fully developed people. For example, Ali’s friend Gwen embarks on an extended discussion of positive thinking when they first meet, saying, “I believe we each create our own reality….My world, my life, is whatever I believe it to be.” The dialogue, rather than representing realistic conversations, takes on a didactic, moralizing tone. The idea of going on a soul-searching road trip to meet people who were important in the past is an engaging one, yet so many pages are spent on people whom the reader hasn’t met before that incidents tend to blend together. What’s more, a character who serves as a potential love interest for Ali doesn’t actually get to appear or speak in the novel, a missed opportunity to get to know someone who might have helped her move on. While the premise of the novel is full of heart, it has too few three-dimensional characters to truly come to life.
A story of catastrophic loss that fails to stand out from the crowded field of books on grief.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615925233
Page Count: 338
Publisher: The Telltale Scribe
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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