Love and familial empathy shine through in this quiet, powerful novel.
In the final book of Dzikowski’s Moon Trilogy, a 44-year-old artist leaves New York City to visit a town that shares her name, where a stranger is looking for her.
Ohioan Leon Ziemny knows “things could flip on a nickel,” and in this series entry, things certainly do: Leon’s childhood home back in Langston, Indiana, is on a list of buildings to be demolished. His middle-aged daughter, Willow, unexpectedly shows up in his current hometown of Weeping Willow, Ohio, just after someone else wanders into town asking about her. Leon’s first wife, Noël Trudeau, died giving birth to Willow in this quiet town, which was known as just Willow back then. Tragedy haunts several families there, including the Ziemnys and Trudeaus as well as the Ketchfields, so it’s no wonder that the town was renamed after the weeping willow trees that Leon planted after Noël’s death. Noël’s parents, Jack and Lily Trudeau, had moved to Willow in 1953, not long after the horrific death of Black preacher Raymond Roberts in their former Louisiana town. Over the years, the families experience a stillbirth, a premature death, suicides, and—in 2020—further tragedy after the unexpected appearance of the preacher’s elderly younger brother Booker, who’s trying to solve his own family’s mysteries. Time works differently in small towns, and in the best novels about such places, the prose does, as well: “This is a messy world. We live in an in-between place,” the preacher tells Lily in 1953, as read by Willow in 2020, and all time seems to exist at once. Letters found in secret compartments, medical records stashed in basements, and a buried Bible effectively bring the past’s mysteries to life and complicate the present. Somehow, Dzikowski keeps the narrative moving with the unhurried consistency of a sidewalk stroll to the corner store—one in which, as Lily writes in a letter, “even the cracks on the sidewalk seem to sing.”
Love and familial empathy shine through in this quiet, powerful novel.Pub Date: July 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780984030583
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Wiara Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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