by Amy Mason Doan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 26, 2018
A poignant tale of mothers and daughters finding their ways home to each other.
Seventeen years ago, Laura Christie suddenly fled her home on the lake of beautiful Coeur-de-Lune. But she cannot resist an invitation back to see her estranged best friend.
Adopted by an older couple, Laura had chafed under her mother’s strict, religious rules, not to mention the school bullies. So when red-haired Casey and her artistic, flighty mom, Alex, moved into the run-down house everyone called The Shipwreck, just across the lake, Laura was intrigued. Soon the girls were the best of friends, and Alex—too young to remember she was supposed to impose rules—was included in most of their shenanigans. With Casey and Alex at her side, Laura shook off her shyness, creating a new, vibrant family yet fracturing her relationship with her adoptive parents. Now 35, Casey and Laura need to mend their friendship, and Alex, with the help of Laura’s ex-boyfriend J.B., has designed a scavenger hunt to help them. The hunt sends them to all of their old haunts, including the restaurant where Casey first came out to Laura and the roller-skating rink where Laura first met J.B. Looming behind their summer reunion, however, is the question of Laura’s biological parentage. Threading the tale of Laura's biological mother throughout the novel, her debut, Doan builds toward the revelation by tightening the bond between Laura and Casey, whose mothers turn out to have been friends, too. Resisting their own mothers’ religious constraints, these women of the 1980s found each other at summer camp, forging a strong bond. Without judgment, Doan carefully portrays their living in a commune with one of Coeur-de-Lune’s sons. Casey and Laura learn how their own mothers faced parental disapproval, teenage pregnancy, and drug use to accept why only Casey’s mom could take on motherhood.
A poignant tale of mothers and daughters finding their ways home to each other.Pub Date: June 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-525-80425-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Graydon House
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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by Lisa Jewell
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by Lisa Jewell
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by Lisa Jewell
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