Although plunged into devastating losses as well as great joy, Hatvany’s characters suffer from a lack of emotional range...
What if the best thing for an artist is to lose his creativity? What if the best thing for a father is to leave his family? What if the best thing for a little girl is to lose her father? Who decides what’s best?
Hatvany (Best Kept Secret, 2011, etc.) explores the collisions between mental illness and societal expectations, artistic creativity and medical treatment, love and responsibility. David loves paints passionately, loves his wife Lydia and adores his daughter Eden. The demons of mental illness screech in his head, yet the price of silencing them is steep. Although self-medicating with alcohol dampens the voices, it does little for his impulsive behavior. Taking his prescribed lithium helps him stay inside the lines, behaving properly and making Lydia believe he is trying to get better. But the lithium destroys his creativity and deadens his emotions. Young Eden stands by her father’s side through years of depression, hospitalizations, jail, lies and self-recriminations. Given a final chance by Lydia to take his medication and get well, David fails again. But this time he is driven so deeply into self-loathing that he attempts suicide. Realizing how dangerous David has become to Eden’s well-being, Lydia finally drives him away from his family. Haunted by his absence, Eden spends her life searching for him, wondering what might have been. As she searches homeless shelters and soup kitchens, she meets Jack Baker. An advocate for the people who live outside the lines, Jack offers Eden the chance to understand her father’s world. He also offers her the chance to find real love, anchoring her when she, at last, finds David. But after 20 years, how will father and daughter reconnect?
Although plunged into devastating losses as well as great joy, Hatvany’s characters suffer from a lack of emotional range and a predictable plot.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4054-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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
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
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