A true American tragedy, full of love as well as despair.
Following one crucial day in a marriage tottering on the brink, Schwarz (All Is Vanity, 2002, etc.) shows the fragility, complexity and danger inherent in love.
In a small Wisconsin community in 1963, Walter has sex with Hattie that she claims was rape but he claims was consensual. Hattie’s pregnant friend Marie wants her husband, rising golf star Bud, to defend Hattie’s honor. But Bud believes Walter’s version so Marie—who has her own motives for revenge—uses Hattie’s former boyfriend, bookish Clark, to turn Bud against Walter, son of Bud’s major backer. Skip ahead 40 years to Madison, Wis. Jon, the son of Bud and Marie, has been having an affair with Freddi, his co-worker at an ad agency, but he still loves his landscape architect wife Ginny, Hattie and Clark’s daughter. Jon and Ginny became high school sweethearts after Ginny was injured in an accident for which Jon has always felt responsible but which Ginny has always considered her own fault. With occasional splices back to 1963, the novel covers the crucial Saturday when Jon is deciding whether to stay with Ginny or leave their long marriage for Freddi. As a step toward reconciliation, he plans to take Ginny to a music festival they’ve attended in the past, but Ginny has mixed up her dates and made other, business appointments. Frustrated and hurt, Jon ends up at the festival with Freddi, who carries her own emotional baggage, including a stalker who thinks Freddi is his girlfriend. Ginny’s business appointment is with Walter, who readers quickly suspect may be her real father instead of overprotective, doting Clark. Misconnections and misunderstandings mount as the characters—not just Jon and Ginny, but their parents, their friends and acquaintances—make choices drawing them closer and closer to inevitable disaster. While the manufactured quality of the 1963 story line is a minor problem, Schwarz’s portrait of Jon and Ginny’s loving but damaged marriage is unsparing and heartbreaking.
A true American tragedy, full of love as well as despair.Pub Date: July 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51029-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
