Forget Canadian “niceness”; Strube’s angry, hard-boiled characters confront the same ugly problems found below the 48th...
In this novel of one woman’s daily travails, Strube (On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light, 2016, etc.) offers a Canadian perspective on a range of contemporary issues, from immigration to PTSD to corporate greed to rape.
“Inactive alcoholic” Stevie is kitchen manager at a Toronto chain restaurant where she fights daily to maintain quality despite increasing corporate demands that her location cut corners. Chappy’s is a richly drawn, darkly comic world filled with the clashing cultures of a mostly immigrant staff, an incompetent boss whose ego Stevie adroitly manipulates, and frequent equipment problems. But the chaos also yields camaraderie, and Stevie feels more relaxed at work than in her own apartment, which she shares with her 23-year-old son, Pierce. He has returned from Afghanistan psychologically damaged, but their relationship has always been troubled. Pierce remembers a childhood in which Stevie mostly avoided her parental responsibilities and sometimes physically mistreated him. All true, Stevie acknowledges, but she has never told him the darker truth: Pierce was the product of a gang rape when Stevie was a young teen, a memory she spent her remaining adolescence and early adulthood escaping in self-destructive behaviors involving alcohol and sex. Even now, anxiously fretting over Pierce’s fragile state, she cannot admit feeling maternal love. A prickly, self-aware narrator, Stevie is a woman who, despite being liked by others, eschews emotional involvement. Then two people enter Stevie’s life: Gyorgi, a busboy from Eastern Europe around Pierce’s age who has always known he was the product of rape yet maintains a loving relationship with his Roma mother; and 4-year-old Trudy, whose drugged-out mother abandons her at Stevie’s parents’ doorstep with a note implying Pierce is her father. There may be more melodrama than necessary, but even as intimacy and affection slip into Stevie’s life, the gritty narration holds sentimentality at bay.
Forget Canadian “niceness”; Strube’s angry, hard-boiled characters confront the same ugly problems found below the 48th parallel.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77041-494-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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