A callow young hotshot gets taken down more than a few pegs in this caustic, darkly humorous tale of the travails—and unlikely consolations—of traumatic brain injury.
Matt Riggs, a 29-year-old sportswriter in Jacksonville, Fla., has everything he wants: good looks, a beautiful girlfriend named Amanda, a manipulative way with words and a super-sized ego that keeps him focused on the one thing that matters—himself. Then a car crash puts him in a coma. When he awakens, he lacks the coordination to blink and swallow, let alone walk, talk or bathe; it’s anyone’s guess when or if he’ll regain the use of his body or the ability to marshal his cloudy, scattered thoughts. As Matt claws his way toward an uncertain recovery, his story, based on the author’s real-life experience of brain injury, is as gnarled as his recalcitrant limbs, with human frailties and awkward emotional clashes on all sides. Amanda, appalled at the prospect of caring for a virtual infant with a stroke-victim’s sneer instead of the swaggering stud she hoped to marry, drifts away toward another man. Matt’s estranged father takes him home, but a lifetime’s resentments have them perpetually at each other’s throats. Matt wallows in self-pity and feelings of betrayal directed, above all, at his body as he struggles to relearn the most basic physical tasks. Yet as he pines for his vanished strength and social grace, he also starts to understand how glib and insensitive his old life was and realizes that, ravaged as he is, he can now feel “an immense pleasure to be alive” that he never knew before. Siders writes with an energetic, evocative style, and brilliantly captures Matt’s voice: smart, sarcastic, funny and pissed-off, and ruefully aware amid his put-upon brooding of his own shortcomings and screw-ups. By avoiding fake sentiment and uplift, Siders makes his astringent rendering of Matt’s painful self-recovery all the more resonant. A wry, moving portrait of a man trying to get his head straight.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461086918
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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