An addictive drama with moments of engaging excitement and an admirable young female hero.
A teenage girl is abandoned by her parents in Whitney’s historical drama of struggle and redemption.
Readers meet 13-year-old Silstice “Silly” Trayson in August of 1934. She is terrified, sitting in the sheriff’s office in Calhoun County, Michigan, after being caught stealing school supplies from her former one-room schoolhouse. Silly is a shy, timid girl, the fourth of six siblings born to poverty-stricken, neglectful, and abusive parents. (The family is known in the community as the “Trashy Traysons.”) Fortunately, Silly has two advocates: Her 17-year-old sister, Alberta, makes assurances to the sheriff that Silly has never been in trouble before, brings her home, and arranges for her to join the local 4-H club, where Edna Goetz becomes her mentor in the girls’ sewing and cooking division. Edna is a gentle and generous elderly lady who develops an immediate fondness for the young girl. Edna’s husband, Vernon, the crotchety, volatile 4-H county Beef Club mentor, is decidedly displeased with Edna’s attention to Silly. When Silly’s house burns to the ground, the fragile girl is left homeless. Her father runs off, never to be seen again; her mother places Silly’s twin 15-year-old sisters with their aunt and takes off with the family’s two young sons to live with her own parents. Alberta moves in with her best friend’s family. Nobody has room for Silly until Edna devises a clever and generous plan to take her in. Whitney’s novel is narrated by three alternating and distinctive voices, those of Silly, Edna, and Vernon, each defining the relationship developing among them. In equal measure, this is an affecting coming-of-age tale about Silly, who begins to find her inner strength and confidence, and the poignant story of Vernon’s gradual transformation (“He hadn’t been an easy man to live with”) after experiencing profound loss. Whitney keeps the action moving with a subplot in which Silly’s brothers become victims of an extortion and child-abduction ring operating in the town. Although the narrative borders on high melodrama, the author viscerally captures the deprivation, hunger, and despair suffered by many during the height of the Depression.
An addictive drama with moments of engaging excitement and an admirable young female hero.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781647428365
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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