With just the right touch of bitters, Williams (Cocoa Beach, 2017, etc.) mixes a satisfyingly tempestuous—and eminently...
Twenty years after a murder at her family’s tony Long Island Sound summer enclave, an expatriate actress returns to right a terrible injustice and heal her broken heart.
From June to August, generations of fishermen from Winthrop Island’s year-round Portuguese community have supplied the lobsters and occasional bootleg for bridge parties, weddings, golf tournaments, and other social occasions organized by the island’s patrician cottagers. Just as the locals steer carefully around summer people, the “purebloods” are ever mindful of subtle social gradations within their own set. As one of them, Isobel Fisher, remarks to her divorced father, Hugh, on the day of his wedding, “Thank God you’ve found a dear, lovely woman to marry…and not some gimlet goddess from the Club.” It’s 1951, and the Fishers are still regarded as new money (derived from an ancestor’s investment in toilets), their summer redoubt, Greyfriars, built on the less fashionable end of the island, next door to the lighthouse. If the summer crowd and locals are in perfect accord over one thing, it’s Isobel’s wild streak and too-close friendship with the lighthouse keeper’s handsome son, Joseph Vargas, while engaged to a scion of the old guard. As she tells her soon-to-be stepsister, Miranda Schuyler (who has her own thoughts about Joseph), “I haven’t got your brains, I’m afraid. I need a little action to keep me happy.” As in many Williams novels, there’s quite a bit of zigzagging though the 1930s, '50s, and '60s to fill in the characters’ backstories and milk the main plot intrigue: the murder of Hugh Fisher and a homicide verdict that’s fishier than a Fourth of July clambake. Eyebrows lift when the victim’s stepdaughter, Miranda, steps onto the island for the first time in decades. Since moving to Europe she’s become a successful actress, never mind the enormous shiner her movie-star sunglasses can’t quite conceal. To outward appearances, the salacious curiosity about her stepfather’s murder which drove her from the island has greatly faded. Even her dear, lovely mother and Isobel, still single (and sullen), appear to have moved on, converting Greyfriars into a glorified boardinghouse and calling it an artists’ colony. Meanwhile, the family of Joseph Vargas—the admitted killer sent to Sing Sing—is stone-faced about his recent prison escape and rumored sightings near the island. Helping Miranda in her effort to clear Joseph—whom she believes innocent, though she keeps her reasons close to the vest—are her rambunctious half brother, Hugh Jr., (born after their father's murder), the ladies boarding at Greyfriars, and old-shoe banker Clayton Monk, Isobel’s square, endearingly steady ex-flame. As Miranda’s Shakespearean namesake would say: "How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't."
With just the right touch of bitters, Williams (Cocoa Beach, 2017, etc.) mixes a satisfyingly tempestuous—and eminently beachworthy—follow-up to her beloved Schuyler Sisters series.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-266034-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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
Hoover is one of the freshest voices in new-adult fiction, and her latest resonates with true emotion, unforgettable...
Sydney and Ridge make beautiful music together in a love triangle written by Hoover (Losing Hope, 2013, etc.), with a link to a digital soundtrack by American Idol contestant Griffin Peterson.
Hoover is a master at writing scenes from dual perspectives. While music student Sydney is watching her neighbor Ridge play guitar on his balcony across the courtyard, Ridge is watching Sydney’s boyfriend, Hunter, secretly make out with her best friend on her balcony. The two begin a songwriting partnership that grows into something more once Sydney dumps Hunter and decides to crash with Ridge and his two roommates while she gets back on her feet. She finds out after the fact that Ridge already has a long-distance girlfriend, Maggie—and that he's deaf. Ridge’s deafness doesn’t impede their relationship or their music. In fact, it creates opportunities for sexy nonverbal communication and witty text messages: Ridge tenderly washes off a message he wrote on Sydney’s hand in ink, and when Sydney adds a few too many e’s to the word “squee” in her text, Ridge replies, “If those letters really make up a sound, I am so, so glad I can’t hear it.” While they fight their mutual attraction, their hope that “maybe someday” they can be together playfully comes out in their music. Peterson’s eight original songs flesh out Sydney’s lyrics with a good mix of moody musical styles: “Living a Lie” has the drama of a Coldplay piano ballad, while the chorus of “Maybe Someday” marches to the rhythm of the Lumineers. But Ridge’s lingering feelings for Maggie cause heartache for all three of them. Independent Maggie never complains about Ridge’s friendship with Sydney, and it's hard to even want Ridge to leave Maggie when she reveals her devastating secret. But Ridge can’t hide his feelings for Sydney long—and they face their dilemma with refreshing emotional honesty.
Hoover is one of the freshest voices in new-adult fiction, and her latest resonates with true emotion, unforgettable characters and just the right amount of sexual tension.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5316-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
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