A lighthearted romp, tinged with melancholy, that gently pokes fun at sexual mores and those who defy them.
What happens when a celebrated feminist carries on a highly charged affair with her only daughter’s closest friend?
Despite very different temperaments, Alice and Sadie have been inseparable since adolescence. They remain so in their early 20s, though easygoing Alice is halfheartedly pursuing an acting career in Los Angeles while hardworking Sadie remains in the Bay Area doggedly working her way up in a design firm. Celine is Sadie’s mother, a professor of lesbian-feminist theory at Berkeley who works hard to remain unconventional. When Alice gets a part in a play and Sadie can’t attend, she asks Celine to go in her place. A comic romantic nightmare ensues. Forty-four-year-old Celine is gobsmacked by her sudden attraction to Alice, whom she’s never before found particularly interesting, and Alice, who has enjoyed sex with a lot of men, surprises herself by responding to Celine’s attraction in kind. Caught up in their mutual desires and unable to acknowledge that Sadie may see their behavior as betrayal, the lovers tacitly agree not to mention their affair to her, even as weeks pass by. Meanwhile, Sadie is involved in her own sexual crisis: still being a virgin at age 23. Thanks to her unorthodox childhood with Celine, she's developed inhibitions she's trying to overcome, so far unsuccessfully, with her conveniently adoring, nerdy boyfriend—who, like Alice’s and Sadie’s fathers, remains so palely sketched he barely registers. The novel flits among the three women without going deep. Readers learn about Alice’s emotionally chilly mother and sympathize with Sadie’s trials as Celine’s daughter. Ultimately, though, the novel belongs to Celine, a larger-than-life personality full of contradictions. Her boundless love can be smothering, her ideas smart but half-baked, her boundary-breaking playful and cruel. She’s a would-be feminist goddess, monstrous yet hard to dislike.
A lighthearted romp, tinged with melancholy, that gently pokes fun at sexual mores and those who defy them.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781668021590
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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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