Warm, rich, beautifully written, and very hard to follow.
An unconventional chosen family spreads its branches over decades and continents.
Bloom’s latest opens with a deathbed scene that introduces the core cast of her lively but elliptical narrative, which hopscotches from France in the 1930s and ‘40s to Mexico in the 1980s to the Hudson Valley in the 1990s and 2010s, adding numerous key characters along the way. (Get out your pencil and paper, because you’re not going to be able to remember who’s who without taking notes.) At the center of the ensemble are Gazala and Samir Benamar, a French Algerian sister and brother who are orphaned in prewar Paris. Typical of this novel, their baker father is killed off in a single, glancing sentence: “We do not arrange for a proper burial.” Similarly, we are told only in passing that Samir was adopted as a baby by Gazala’s parents, a fact worth recalling when the two, after many years of separation, reunite and become lovers. A wonderful section has Gazala working for the writer Colette during the Vichy occupation and meeting her friend the jewelry designer Suzanne Belperron (do Google to get a peek at her work). After the war, Gazala emigrates to New York and becomes a baker herself. There she meets the Cohen family, whose daughters, Alma and Anne, become part of the core group known as the Greats, pillars of the chosen family, the ones who eventually gather at Gazala’s deathbed. Anne Cohen will eventually leave her husband, Richard, for his sister, Honey, a novelist. Early in the novel, a shaggy-dog storytelling game called Barbary Lion Escapes is introduced; later we learn of another one called Dead People’s Party, “a mental get-together of everyone you’ve ever known who mattered.” Well, this novel is Barbary Lion meets Dead People’s Party—full of surprises, wild leaps and turns, and many fascinating people who love each other.
Warm, rich, beautifully written, and very hard to follow.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9781984801722
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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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