Pride and Piazza ask hard questions about race and what it means to be a mother.
Long-hidden secrets and trauma threaten two women’s plans for their lives.
Pride and Piazza, the duo behind We Are Not Like Them (2021), a thought-provoking and popular-with-book-clubs treatment of race and interracial friendships, advance that conversation with a contemporary story about race and mothering. Cinnamon Haynes, a 34-year-old community college counselor, lives with her (unsuccessful) entrepreneur husband, Jayson. Cinnamon survived for years as a Black child in the foster care system and still deals with its painful legacy. One coping mechanism she employs is to avoid revealing her background to most people, including her best friend, Lucia, and Jayson. When Cinnamon strikes up a casual but genuine friendship with Daisy, a 19-year-old White woman she's taken to meeting every Friday in a local park for lunch, the stakes are raised dramatically in Cinnamon’s game of escaping her past. Daisy, who carries several secrets of her own, upends Cinnamon’s carefully constructed facade when she designs a plan for Cinnamon to “accidentally” find and then raise the baby daughter she's given birth to after a concealed pregnancy (and her flight from the area). Reluctant to subject anyone else to the conditions and experiences she suffered in the care system, Cinnamon struggles to balance her increasing affection for the blue-eyed baby—whom she refers to as Bluebell—against the social and personal factors weighing against her becoming Bluebell’s adoptive mother. Pride and Piazza’s narrative offers myriad opportunities for reflections on interracial adoption, the loss of cultural and racial legacy in those adoptions, and what is truly in the best interest of the child. The slow reveal of Cinnamon’s journey allows for varying points of view to be shared, including those of friends, spouses, mothers-in-laws, and social workers, as well as the motivations of both Cinnamon and Daisy.
Pride and Piazza ask hard questions about race and what it means to be a mother.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781668005507
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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