Behind the scenes of the tabloids, this novel finds a dated plot, dopey dialogue and cardboard characters.
The turbulent career of a Hollywood star, from the indie film festival to the red carpet to the lonely bedroom in the mansion.
Known for biting satires of Brooklyn yuppies, Sohn (Motherland, 2012, etc.) has laid down her lance and joined the paparazzi with this slow-moving, predictable novel of the Hollywood A-list. You've heard of TomKat and Brangelina—meet SteMad, a nickname which would be terrific if this were a comic novel but is presented here with the phoned-in, almost medicated dullness that is the dominant tone of this book. Its heroine, Maddy Freed, leaves her indie director boyfriend for Hollywood icon Steven Weller, a leading man whose career has been plagued by rumors that he is…wait for it…gay. Naïve Maddy is tormented by this vicious lie, which she thinks can't be true because if it were, how could he have sex with a woman? "His breath was hot as he leaned in and kissed her. She had never been kissed like this. His lips were soft but deft....The kiss went on through entire decades of cinema...and the kiss was nothing like the ho-hum kisses Dan had given her lately; it had personality and confidence, and she offered her whole mouth, her self, to him." Poor Maddy; she's got a lot to learn. As her market value and critical esteem rocket past those of her aging-hottie husband, she is ever more isolated and mistreated. On the plus side, Sohn knows her Hollywood; even the names of minor characters—directors Walter Juhasz and Elkan Hocky, screenwriter Oded Zalinsky—have a savvy energy that hints at how good this book could have been if played for laughs.
Behind the scenes of the tabloids, this novel finds a dated plot, dopey dialogue and cardboard characters.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9861-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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