A vivid, engrossing portrait of a family amid the turmoil of death and revelations.
In this debut novel, three estranged sisters must reconnect to receive their inheritance and uncover familial secrets.
Annie LeBlanc, the protagonist of Larivee’s story, is living a happily married existence in Berlin despite the encroaching catastrophe of climate change and a rush of pandemics. On an otherwise normal morning, she spots a ghost across the train platform. At first, she doesn’t recognize the apparition. But when she gets home, she looks inside an odd box that she recently received full of old photographs from her hometown in Maine, and realizes it was her grandmother. Annie soon finds out that her two sisters, Jeanne and Mary, received similar mysterious boxes, and that all three are being called back home to Maine. Their father—a reclusive, harsh, and successful novelist—has died, and they’re required to be present at the reading of his will. After an emotionally charged reunion, the sisters arrive in Maine to discover that their father was fabulously wealthy, and has left them his entire estate, so long as they agree to spend at least one month together in their childhood home. This would be strange enough, but it turns out that Mary is also seeing ghosts and Jeanne has been observing them since childhood. As the sisters come to grips with their newfound affluence, they discover that their parents’ ugly marriage was more complicated than it seemed, and that their father may have been their protector all along. While a surprise to the three women, these secrets are well known to a small sect of locals (including another celebrated author) who have their own motives regarding the sisters. Larivee’s novel is not short on pathos. Fortunately, she has skillfully drawn the relationships between the three women, each of whom readers will happily follow. Many of her details are rich with the authenticity of lived experience, such as the author’s rendering of Berlin in an era before cellphones, “where a counter on the phone let you know how much you were spending, click, click, click. The longer the distance, the faster the clicks.” Readers looking for groundbreaking prose may not find it here, but those in search of a deeply felt, highly plotted family narrative will be delighted.
A vivid, engrossing portrait of a family amid the turmoil of death and revelations.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798992207316
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© 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.
