An intense but stunningly hopeful story about drug addiction, loss, and relationships.
A teenager full of promise succumbs to drugs and ends up fighting for his life in this heart-wrenching, suspenseful tale.
The book opens as Beck is being rushed to the emergency room. He showed up on his mother’s doorstep after having disappeared for two straight months and immediately collapsed from a drug overdose. The doctors put Beck into a medically induced coma and tell his mother, Natalie, that they will wait 24 hours for the swelling in his brain to decrease. Until they bring him out of the coma, they won’t know whether he will survive. Most of the story is told as Natalie is at the hospital, waiting to see whether her son will live or die. The narration alternates between the history that led Beck to this moment and the present, when his mother is praying for his survival. We learn that Beck was visiting colleges with his dad when they got into a car accident that resulted in his father’s death. Following the sudden loss of her husband, Natalie spirals into debilitating depression, leaving 18-year-old Beck with the responsibility of looking after his much younger siblings and paying the household bills. As Natalie’s depression drags on, Beck’s guilt at surviving the accident increases, and his own coping skills decline. He helps himself to Natalie’s Xanax, which takes the edge off, but only at first. Soon this superstar athlete is regularly smoking pot. But the marijuana, too, ceases to adequately dull Beck’s memories and grief. When his buddy hands him some heroin, Beck decides to go for it. Before long, he is completely hooked and slipping into an increasingly dangerous lifestyle of needles, drug dealers, and violence. This riveting story highlights the unrelenting force of addiction and the havoc it can wreak on any family. Through accessible and absorbing prose, Cole (The Nocte Trilogy, 2015, etc.) tells an important tale full of complex characters and nuanced family drama.
An intense but stunningly hopeful story about drug addiction, loss, and relationships.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8452-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
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