A good coming-of-age story lies buried underneath a ridiculously overdetermined and didactic plot.
Scheibe (What Do You Do All Day?, 2006) chronicles a Minnesota girl’s journey toward independence in a story set in 1958 with pointed contemporary parallels.
Eighteen-year-old Emmy Nelson has known for years that she's expected to marry Ambrose Brann, but since her father moved the family off the farm to a bigger town on the North Dakota border, she feels her horizons expanding beyond her mother Karin’s cramped notions of the proper destiny for a good Lutheran girl. She re-establishes contact with long-estranged, more easygoing relatives and gets a job on the switchboard at the local newspaper, learning the basics of journalism with the help of a friendly reporter. Emmy’s growing maturity is well-portrayed, as is postwar life in the rural Midwest, still very much governed by traditional values—which, in the author’s stinging depiction, include racism, sexism and xenophobia. Scheibe’s indictment would be more persuasive if it weren’t so overdone: It’s not enough for Ambrose to be 10 years older than Emmy and creepily under the thumb of the sinister Curtis Davidson; he has to rape her, and when she tells Karin Ambrose hit her, her mother’s response has to be, “How did you provoke him?” The unfolding story also includes three other rapes, a murder pinned on an innocent Mexican, two suspicious fires and another climactic piece of arson, all of them blatantly designed to make it clear just how dangerous Davidson and his Citizens’ Council are. Revelations about a dead relative in the Ku Klux Klan and a nice Catholic boy who turns out to be gay add to the overheated tone and will come as no surprise to attentive readers. When a rural crowd listening to Davidson rant about low-income housing and shiftless immigrants begins chanting, “Citizens united, can’t be divided,” it’s clear the author intends readers to make the connection between then and now, but she sabotages her case by making it so luridly.
A good coming-of-age story lies buried underneath a ridiculously overdetermined and didactic plot.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04967-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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