The pleasures of this novel’s writing, characters, and plot are fully equal to its good intentions.
When their patriarch donates the family fortune to charity, an already unhappy family is thoroughly atomized.
It doesn’t always work to write a novel driven by moral purpose. With so much enlightenment to deliver, how much fun can it be? In the case of Brooks’ debut, there’s nothing to worry about. Even the particulars of the grand gesture that sets the plot in motion reveal the book’s wry aesthetic. As the novel opens, Arthur and Yara Candlewick are confronting their son, Emil, about a little something that came in the mail—LSD and MDMA the 15-year-old purchased on the dark web. That evening, Arthur leaves their house in the Cotswolds for a walk, taking with him “his daughter’s book, his son’s drug stash, and an uncorked bottle of mid-price Bordeaux.” The book in question is an explainer on effective altruism, one which radical-minded 17-year-old Evangeline was reading at the dinner table “with the urgency of an actress searching for her own name in a bad review.” Arthur himself will read it at the bottom of a mineshaft into which he has fallen, under the influence of a mind-expanding drug cocktail. After he’s rescued, he’s a different man, determined to give away all the proceeds of the impending sale of his company and to live a life of monastic simplicity. None of the other members of the family will follow him on this path; even Evangeline finds herself annoyed and alienated by the fact that the focal point of her rebellion has “cheated and become exactly the kind of person she wanted to be, overnight, and with no effort whatsoever.” Brooks makes each of these flawed characters endearing by showing not just their pettiness and limitations but what is in their hearts. “As a teenager, Yara had always imagined that her family, when she had one, would be an inseparable band of bantering adventurers, going forth into the world together, on road trips and holidays and outings to restored castles or spangly caves. She had never expected that they would be four people conducting four entirely separate lives out of the same building, like businesses sharing space in a shopping arcade, their owners nodding to each other as they arrived early to roll up the shutters.” Impressively, Brooks finds a way to the greatest good for each of them.
The pleasures of this novel’s writing, characters, and plot are fully equal to its good intentions.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089460
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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