When post-menopausal women tipsy on wine dance to Al Green, can red hats be far away?
Christmas cookie bakers share more than recipes in psychotherapist Pearlman’s debut.
This version of the women’s club as group confessional à la The Jane Austen Book Club (movie rights have been optioned) is a Christmas Cookie exchange. At her Ann Arbor home, “Head Cookie Bitch” Marnie hosts the CCC’s annual party, guest list strictly limited to 12. Each woman “presents” her particular homemade confection. Unsurprisingly, the cookies represent life changes. Marnie herself anxiously awaits news of a recent ultrasound for daughter Sky, who has had two miscarriages and a stillborn baby. Younger daughter Tara is pregnant by fellow rapper Aaron. Marnie’s objections to Aaron are not so much that he’s African-American—she’s invited Aaron’s mother Sissy to break the color barrier of the all-white CCC—but that he served a term in juvenile prison. Marnie, pushing 60, is also unsure about her younger lover Jim, a single parent whose dedication to his boys and his job causes him repeatedly to break dates. Each member has similar woes except Allie, a sanguine, seen-it-all psychotherapist, also 60ish, whose lover is even younger than Jim. But why has Taylor, who has never exhibited lesbian tendencies, been making moon-eyes at Allie all night? Out come the secret hurts: Charlene’s ironworker son died of a gruesome worksite injury; everyone’s favorite colorist Laurie is moving south for better job opportunities, etc. The most engaging conflict, which might have elevated the dramatic tension if given center stage, involves two feuding members, Rosie and Jeannie, who have fallen out over mutual best friend’s affair with Jeannie’s father (Rosie knew and didn’t tell). Some genuinely informative vignettes about baking ingredients don’t entirely compensate for girlfriend bonding, and prose, that frequently verge on mawkish.
When post-menopausal women tipsy on wine dance to Al Green, can red hats be far away?Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5884-5
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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