A measured and precise tale.
A successful doctor and mother suffers an emotionally abusive arranged marriage in Koduri’s novel.
Paru is a young medical student in 1970s Hyderabad, India, obsessed with the passion of Bollywood movies, the romance of novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and her fellow classmate Harsha. Their pairing is not to be, as Paru’s older brothers have publicly shamed their Brahmin family by marrying impulsively, leaving her father and mother to rush the 23-year-old Paru into an arranged marriage with Samar, a doctor who lives in America. Heartbroken over losing Harsha, Paru is nevertheless charmed by her new husband’s kind words and overeager lovemaking. But cracks begin to show even before she joins Samar in the U.S.; his family is greedy and demanding, and Samar himself shows signs of being imperious and controlling. This only worsens when Paru arrives in Chicago—her husband’s moods shift dramatically and unexpectedly, and he belittles her privately and publicly. Despite this, she still finds success in her new home, becoming a respected gynecologist and raising two bright, beautiful children. When Samar cheats on Paru with a resident, devotion and convention dictate forgiveness, but her cautious, contentious coexistence with Samar seems twice as torturous compared to the ease she feels around her newly reappeared first love, Harsha. Koduri’s prose is straightforward and at times almost mechanical, trading style for substance by punctuating scenes with particularly devastating or revelatory insights. (Paru’s mother, a lawyer, also struggles with traditional values: “Although she occasionally escaped them, Amma was still a woman bound by her conventions.”) Emotional subtlety and thematic cohesion pervade the novel—Harsha’s return doesn’t radically shift the narrative into a fantastical romance; instead, it illustrates a far more mature version of love, grounded in communication and respect, far from the Bollywood dance numbers the protagonist once dreamed of. The pacing can best be described as contemplative—the narrative captures what the day-to-day endurance of emotional strife looks like in practice.
A measured and precise tale.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798891325517
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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