The email-driven narrative and multiple subplots show technical dexterity and wit, but the soullessness of the world Paesel...
Paesel (Mommies Who Drink, 2006) structures her dark comedy about the First-World problems of upper-middle-class Californians around a constant stream of emails circulating among the parents of 10-year-olds on a junior soccer team.
Although the Manatees belong to a league in supposedly glamorous Beverly Hills, anyone whose kids have ever played sports will recognize the absurdities of team politics as expressed in the emails. The Manatees’ parents are a hot mess of ego, insecurity, and libido. An annoying yoga instructor continually complains about unhealthy snacks. An aggressive, anything-for-a-win dad wages ongoing warfare with his steely attorney ex-wife despite the negative impact on their rage-filled son. The team mother puts a happy face on every team screw-up while she pretends her son’s frighteningly extreme behavior is normal. Stereotypical Korean immigrants tiger-parent their athletically talented son, unaware of the boy’s other secret talents—stealing and out-of-body travel, the latter adding an incongruous dash of surrealism that never really makes sense. Recently divorced, relatively self-aware Diane, whose point of view dominates the narrative, finds reading and sometimes responding to e-mails while drinking wine (lots of it) the perfect escape from loneliness. And then there’s Coach Randy. As jovial and upbeat as he tries to come across in his group emails, referring to himself as “your favorite coach! (kidding),” he faces his own crises with growing distress. Though he's unaware that his much-younger wife, Missy, is having an affair with Alejandro, the hunky Colombian college student hired as a “private skills coach” for the boys, he still can't bring himself to tell her that he’s been fired from his job. Instead he confides in Diane, who is also involved with Alejandro. The plot shenanigans are more sad than silly because the pain avoidance practiced by most of the adult characters through secrecy, misrepresentation, or self-delusion tends to cause only more pain.
The email-driven narrative and multiple subplots show technical dexterity and wit, but the soullessness of the world Paesel describes is depressing.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4564-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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