Beautifully crafted and devoid of sentimentality.
Eight elegant short stories by Canadian novelist Windley (Breathing Underwater, 1998, etc.) plumb the themes of loss, memory and the desire to belong.
Disappointment is the norm for the clear-eyed, quietly intelligent protagonists. In “Home Schooling,” 17-year-old Annabel lives with her family in a desolate abandoned boarding school on a remote Canadian island; her father had been headmaster until a student’s accidental drowning led to the school’s closing. Annabel is sleeping with a college student she’s identified as her “likeliest means of rescue,” but then she learns that he’s in love with her younger sister. “Children’s Games” chronicles the discomfort of a restless young woman who moves into the home of her boyfriend, a single dad, and finds it still filled with the belongings of his ex-wife. In “Felt Skies,” a fledgling copywriter who grew up without a father gets involved with a hard-drinking, much older journalist, to the chagrin of her loving mother. “The Joy of Life” follows Alex as she accompanies her glamorous best friend Désirée to an artist’s retreat in Wales. She winds up babysitting Désirée’s young daughter Loren while mom carries on with a local poet, a fraught situation further complicated by the fact that Alex secretly covets her friend’s husband back at home. Alex isn’t the only character who leaves most of her feelings unaddressed. In the haunting opening piece, “What Saffi Knows,” the eponymous heroine recalls her childhood some 40 years earlier, when she may have been the sole witness to an unspeakable act she could not recognize at the time as a crime. With nary a false or clumsy sentence, Windley demonstrates an effortless understanding of complex human nature that invites obvious comparisons to her gifted compatriot Alice Munro. This slim volume gives every indication that they are warranted.
Beautifully crafted and devoid of sentimentality.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-87113-994-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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
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
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