Siddons is at her usual incisive best at skewering the mores of socially pretentious Southerners, and her prose is limpid...
Summer camps play a pivotal role in the life of a young Atlanta heiress.
Thayer Wentworth has always been a disappointment to her mother, Crystal. Tomboyish, and too much like Crystal’s distrusted mother-in-law, Caroline, known as “Grand,” Thayer yearns for the life of the mind. In this Thayer resembles her father Finch, an educator, who died in an accident en route from a camp on Burnt Mountain. Grand, who refused to grant Crystal (a shopkeeper’s daughter) entree to Atlanta’s aristocratic Buckhead set, clearly favors Thayer over her more frivolous older sister Lily. When Grand moves into Crystal’s house after Finch dies, she grooms Thayer to inherit her father’s rarified legacy. First, there’s a counselorship at Sherwood Forest, an exclusive girls’ camp, where Thayer meets Nick Abrams, counselor at a nearby boys’ camp. The two fall madly in love and vow to marry, however when Nick departs for Europe, Thayer learns she is pregnant. Nick never writes or phones as he promised, and Thayer is tricked by Crystal into having an abortion. After a difficult physical and emotional recovery, Thayer attends Sewanee University at Grand’s urging, and there she meets and weds Celtic mythology professor Aengus. Crystal and Grand are no more thrilled about the Irish Aengus than they were about the Jewish Nick, however Grand is at least supportive. After a shocking betrayal (Crystal tells Aengus that the abortion left Thayer sterile), a permanent mother-daughter rift results. Grand dies, leaving Thayer and Aengus a rustic fieldstone house in a wooded Atlanta suburb. At first life is blissful, but then a local corrupt politician flatters Aengus into propagating Celtic lore at a boys’ camp (which churns out the Atlanta equivalent of Stepford Teens) that's located, ominously enough, on Burnt Mountain. Suddenly Aengus’ seemingly benign Celtic obsession turns into something menacing and Michael Flatley–like.
Siddons is at her usual incisive best at skewering the mores of socially pretentious Southerners, and her prose is limpid and mesmerizing, but the grand gignol denouement beggars belief.Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-52789-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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