A thoughtful and elegant exploration of 21st-century motherhood.
After decades of solitude, a San Francisco author’s life—and her ambitions—change when she reconnects with a college friend in Henneberg’s novel.
For years, Josiewas convinced that Radhika, an incisive editor whom she met at a college writing seminar, was dead. The announcement, five years after college, that Rad had been diagnosed with breast cancer shocked Josie at first, but in the 12 years that followed, she moved on with her life—completing a graduate degree in fiction, releasing a short story collection to modest praise, and, most recently, attempting to have a baby through artificial insemination. When she comes across an article in The Atlantic that Rad has written—a raw account of her battle with breast cancer during her residency in an abortion clinic, and the subsequent birth of her twins—Josie is hesitant to reach out. But several months later, she runs into her old acquaintance in a grocery store and is swept into her friend’s chaotic life once again. Soon, Josie is at Rad’s house every week to share her writing. Amid the critique sessions, Josie shares her own dream of motherhood, anchored in the sudden, tragic death of her own parents. She grows close to Rad’s idyllic-seeming family and develops a relationship with the young babysitter, who often seems to have a stronger connection with the children than they have with their own mother. But when tragedy strikes, the relationships that Josie has come to hold dear threaten to collapse. Amid the frenzy of Covid-19-era San Francisco, vividly portrayed by Henneberg, Josie must make a series of difficult choices—whether to endure the risks of another pregnancy, to abandon her interminable novel, and to preserve difficult relationships. Over the course of this lucid debut novel, the author offers a nuanced portrayal of the complexities that are inherent to modern womanhood, and she does so by anchoring them to consistently compelling characters. The author’s fast-paced, conversational prose style will draw readers quickly into the lives of the various players, whose imperfections have the effect of making them more sympathetic.
A thoughtful and elegant exploration of 21st-century motherhood.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798986066721
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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