An adroit, dry-witted tale about a strong-willed woman trying to live her life.
A woman in 1948 New York City tests the waters of personal independence.
At the opening of Parrish’s novel, a young woman named Edith Sloan is working as a typist in New York, staying with her aunt Margaret, and keeping up a steady correspondence with her law student husband, Walter, who’s at Harvard Law School on the GI Bill. Edith is away from her husband but she’s hardly miserable: She has a job, complete independence, and loves living and bantering with her free-spirited aunt. Edith originally left Walter amicably enough, but the letters from him and his parents (and her own folks) urging her to return to Cambridge and the marriage have become increasingly imploring. Eventually, grudgingly, she decides to leave her life in New York and attempt to become Walter’s idea of a dutiful wife in Massachusetts as he finishes his studies and seeks to become a successful lawyer. This works about as well as readers might expect, and along the way, Edith must also deal with the worsening illness of her stern father and the not-so-subtle condescension of her new peers in Cambridge. Parrish employs a wonderfully light touch throughout these stories of Edith’s adventures, always drawing readers right up to the brink of a flat realization about some situation and then pulling back and letting them step into it themselves. Although Edith is a consistently well-realized and enjoyable character in her own right, another of the book’s strengths is the understated way the author makes Walter the stand-in for an entire generation that expressed offhand sexism. He cluelessly tells Edith, for instance, that he admires her compassion––it’s a beautiful trait in a woman and suggests “the loving mother she would eventually become,” casually adding, “Every woman wants to be a mother.” (He even tells Edith she should ignore book reviews, the clod.) Readers will be quietly cheering for Edith to conquer all.
An adroit, dry-witted tale about a strong-willed woman trying to live her life.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956692-34-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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