Mute the cute and this coulda been a contender, a history lesson about Southern identity. But as it is, the sugar shock is...
Corny, platitudinous and improbable coming-of-age tale about a Civil War–obsessed preteen.
Kat’s a scrapper, a brainiac, an 11-year-old tomboy straight out of an after-school TV special. Daddy’s a beer-swilling homebuilder given to rages about Mother’s cooking (“dried-up hamburgers and pissy peas”). Mom’s a mildly bohemian Southern belle, blonde beauty and abstract painter. And Gable’s a debut novelist who might better consider a YA readership. Seeking refuge from present dysfunction, Kat romances the past. She’s sure every Johnny Reb wore a halo, including her kinfolk wounded at Gettysburg or carrying mail through Yankee lines. Mom plots escape: hitting the interstate, Georgia to Maine, the Impala speeding and Aretha wailing, with Kat by her side. Her daughter is thrilled. Let Mom fantasize a future selling antiques to chowderheads; Kat will see history close-up, detouring at Civil War battlefields. An endless odyssey, their trip flashbacks to every last detail of Kat’s quotidian childhood (menus, school days, falling out of a tree) while she pores over the Golden Book of the Civil War and masters trivia (the size of Stonewall Jackson’s horse, the baffling mystique of the Monitor and Merrimac). It’s 1968, however, and reality dares intrude. With both Dr. King and RFK killed, the headlines are alarming enough to rouse even Kat from her reverie. Glutted with Dixie memorabilia and groggy with tales of Lost Cause glory, she finally wakes up while touring Gettysburg. There she comes upon a fellow fanatic, an unreconstructed racist whose nostalgia for 1865 carnage is a little too loopy even for Kat, and realizes that the slavery-era South wasn’t Eden and war is bad. Gable’s earnestness is almost redeeming, but, my, does her story creep along.
Mute the cute and this coulda been a contender, a history lesson about Southern identity. But as it is, the sugar shock is nearly toxic.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9839-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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
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