A masterful adoption tale: heart-rending and life-affirming in equal measure.
This debut fictional memoir features an adoptee who yearns for her biological mother.
Lexie Saunders is 5 years old when she discovers that she is adopted. The scene is a heartbreaking one. Before tucking Lexie into bed, her adoptive mother explains to her: “I picked you out of a nursery of babies.” After reasoning that she has been abandoned by her biological mother, the young girl asks, “Didn’t she love me?”—a question that her adoptive parent cannot answer. As Lexie falls asleep, she confides: “So began a lifetime of missing Mama. It was like living with a hole inside me.” The book opens at an unconventional moment—on Dec. 26, 1951—six weeks before Lexie’s birth. She narrates her birth mother’s story from inside the womb, explaining the reasons that the baby has to be given up for adoption. She recalls “Mama” being escorted to a “home for unwed mothers” by Lexie’s embarrassed grandmother. Lexie’s biological father, disparagingly called “Junior Sperm Donor,” is also described evading his responsibilities and declaring his intention to marry another girl. The narrative follows Lexie’s coming-of-age, the bonds and rifts with her adoptive family, and her escalating desire to fill the emotional hole inside herself by finding her biological mother. In this self-assured first novel, Bierkan is a powerfully evocative writer, and the way she depicts the bond between mother and unborn child is uncanny: “I breathed the lavender she dabbed behind each of her ears after a bath while she stroked my bottom nestled just behind her belly button.” This sense of safety is brutally juxtaposed with Lexie being “unceremoniously dropped into the arms of the first of many faceless strangers” after her birth and the scent of lavender growing “more and more faint.” In this poignant work filled with emptiness, loss, love, and hope, the prose is startlingly realistic, and readers will be forgiven for mistaking the book for nonfiction. The result is a deeply affecting story that may prove a source of comfort to those with similar adoption experiences.
A masterful adoption tale: heart-rending and life-affirming in equal measure.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4897-1292-9
Page Count: 286
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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