An authentic and poignant depiction of the complex, contradictory relationships among family members.
An aging writer in love with his neighbor traces the stories of her family back for decades.
Peter “Z” Zemeckis won the National Book Award back in 1997, but when readers meet him in 2012, he has eased his way into retirement and irrelevance. He’s about to fulfill the purpose of the little blue pill he swallowed earlier in the night when his date is interrupted by his neighbor and “unrequited love,” Nancy Chu, who asks to borrow his car to rescue her daughter, Charlotte, from a bad situation at a bar. Fascinated with tracing the history of Nancy’s family, Z rewinds to 1977 and the story of Amy, a teenage barrel-racing champion in Amarillo, Texas, whose pregnancy scare forces her to re-evaluate her priorities. “A baby fell out of thin air and she had to let go of everything to make sure she could catch it. Maybe she didn’t want to pick all that stuff back up.” Then it’s off to 1986 and Chinese immigrant Zhiyu, who painstakingly cooks a duck in preparation for dinner with his daughter, our Nancy, and her new boyfriend, Eric. In 2001, Eric and Nancy divorce and Nancy chooses her high-powered career at IBM, leaving Eric, a physics professor, to raise their 12-year-old daughter, Charlotte, alone (that is, if you don’t count the occasional help from his new girlfriend, Amy). Rogers crafts a richly textured vision of everyday life as he explores the ways the bonds of family stretch and collapse over generations. His characters struggle with questions about what it means to be a spouse, a parent, a daughter. In one of several physics metaphors, Z explains that “radioactive atoms also have ‘daughters.’ Parent atoms expend their energy in waves until eventually decaying into different elements altogether.…Why? Because. Just the way of the universe. But ask any father, and he’ll probably tell you: that’s just fine with him.” Rogers is at his best in the details, grounding characters with tidbits like Amy naming her horse Patton “after the American general. Not the actual general. The one from the movie.” The prose, funneled through Z’s narration, never drags; the bungalow where Eric and Charlotte live post-divorce is described as having “the aspect of a man who isn’t growing a beard so much as not shaving.”
An authentic and poignant depiction of the complex, contradictory relationships among family members.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781647792015
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Nevada
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
