An outstanding, unsentimental portrait of family, love, and unavoidable hardships.
A woman in her 30s strives to overcome doubts regarding her romance with a bartender in this novel.
Angie Dugan has no fond memories of her past relationships. The 34-year-old social worker at Lindell Retirement Home in Dunston, New York, has been seeing bartender Matt for well over a month. She fears she’ll do something to drive him away. Years ago, her mom, Lavinia, walked out on her family: She was fed up with her husband Potter’s alcoholism. Though Lavinia soon returned for her five children, Angie continues to have abandonment issues. She consequently keeps people at arm’s length and has difficulty trusting Matt. He certainly doesn’t make it easy; he’s good friends with Sharon, a server at The Watering Hole, where he works. Evidently, Matt and Sharon had a relationship, but is it over, as he claims? Making matters worse is Potter, whose recent problems with his wife, Mary Beth, seem to have driven the recovering alcoholic to drink excessively. As Angie counsels her beloved but troubled father, she tries pushing out negative thoughts concerning Matt in case what the two have is indeed love. Parrish fills her story with indelible characters, most notably the Dugans, who have appeared in her earlier novels. Family propels the narrative, from Angie’s siblings to Matt’s addict sister, Jen, and even a few Lindell residents. The tale delivers a realistic depiction of loving relationships and, as such, is often gloomy. Angie, for example, unquestionably loves her family, undeterred by her sister Marta’s apparent indifference or Potter’s stumbles. At the same time, her burgeoning romance with Matt is thoroughly engaging. Since readers have the same information as Angie, they may likewise wonder about Matt’s intermittently suspicious behavior. The author’s crisp prose keenly details Angie’s predicament, as when she chastises herself for a “nasty sardonic voice” that has become her “default setting.”
An outstanding, unsentimental portrait of family, love, and unavoidable hardships. (dedication, author bio)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950730-60-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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