A deceptively simple tale that packs an emotional punch.
A reunion of old friends reveals the cracks in their perfect facades in this promising debut novel.
Becca, Jordana, Lex, Seth, and Holly are all about 40 years of age. They’ve been friends since childhood, and they all banded together when Becca was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a teenager, and they stayed connected through her treatment and into adulthood. As the 25th anniversary of Becca’s cancer remission approaches, Jordana decides to get the gang back together and throw a reunion party. What’s supposed to be a lighthearted weekend of reconnection, however, quickly goes off the rails. Becca’s marriage is on the rocks, as an unexpected health crisis destabilizes her world. Holly, who’s preparing to have her first child, is beginning to question her strict religious lifestyle. Jordana struggles with unresolved emotions regarding Adam, her high school ex-boyfriend and Holly’s current husband. Lex is coming to terms with her own unhappy marriage just as she begins to have feelings for Seth. In the end, the members of the group must decide if their friendship is still strong enough to keep them together. Although the majority of the plot takes place over the course of a single weekend, Blumenfeld manages to instill real depth into her characters, making them instantly relatable and sympathetic. The plotline involving Lex and Seth could have been more fully developed; as it is, these characters are outshined by the novel’s true stars: Becca, Jordana, and Holly. The latter women are engagingly complex, and every step of their personal journeys feels real and raw. The author rejects nice, neat endings for her characters, and an eleventh-hour tragedy cuts deep. Overall, though, the plot is less important than the author’s love and attention to her cast, which really makes the novel shine.
A deceptively simple tale that packs an emotional punch.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943006-72-4
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Spark Press
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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