A promising premise sadly underdeveloped.
Empty nester has whirlwind affair with indie rock guitarist, with predictable results, in Keating’s second novel (Layla, 2013).
Lily, a slightly zaftig 49-year-old woman with a successful career in industrial videography, a loving if preoccupied city planner husband, Stephen, and a comfortable Manhattan lifestyle, confronts a crossroads when she drops her son, Colby, off at college. How will she define herself now? The answer comes quickly when Colby takes her to a campus performance by “up-and-coming folk rocker” Blaise Raleigh and her lead guitarist, JJ, with his “long ponytail and a worn, raw face that looked dug out of the mountains of Appalachia.” But it isn’t until JJ rips out a riff that Lily is struck by the thunderbolt, or, in her preferred metaphor—if its overuse is any indication—shot through the heart. Approaching JJ after the concert, Lily boldly propositions him to give up smoking, which he does, and then starts following him and Blaise all over upstate New York. (Ostensibly, she’s there to videotape the band.) Stephen is oblivious to his wife’s obsession with a rock star, or more accurately, a talented 43-year-old guitarist who failed to launch a big career. Keating, who writes for Acoustic Guitar magazine, is at her surest when discussing musical issues, whether questions of guitar technique or the challenges of the music business for nonmainstream artists. When, roughly two-thirds of the way through the novel, Lily and JJ finally consummate their flirtation, the situation doesn't seem that fraught. JJ is a genuinely nice person, the age difference is not all that shocking, and Stephen barely notices she’s out of town. None of the potential conflicts are milked for the depth they could afford this novel. When Lily returns to face another sort of music, readers may feel that her come-to-realize moments have been rendered as sketchily as her emotions.
A promising premise sadly underdeveloped.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63152-972-6
Page Count: 220
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
© Copyright 2026 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.
