by Dave Carty ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2024
A quietly potent rumination on the costs, and rewards, of how life ends and begins again.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
In Carty’s novel, a retired teacher finds purpose caring for his Parkinson’s disease-afflicted sister in rural Montana.
Jamison Everett has always been far more comfortable within the literary worlds of Rilke and Steinbeck than the one he lives in; at 72, he’s consummately lonely, retired, and living in Minneapolis on his teacher’s pension. He was never close to his younger sister, Monna, a painter long living in the rural town of Aden, Montana, with her blue-collar husband, Ben Van Hollen. But her Parkinson’s symptoms are getting worse, and they need some help around their homestead. Jamison’s relocation quickly forces him to confront his interpersonal shortcomings, including his simmering tension with Ben and his lack of emotional intimacy with his sister. Ben and Jamison are ideologically at odds; Jamison’s middle-class upbringing and higher education imbue him with a condescension he can’t quite recognize, while Ben’s working-class experience seems to preclude vulnerability or the desire for contemplation. But as time goes on, the two find common ground in their love for Monna and recognition of the other’s value in small moments. Monna, meanwhile, withdraws into herself. While the author largely stays close to Jamison’s perspective, Monna’s solitude while the men are away conveys her deep anguish and indignation at the loss of her artistic and physical abilities. Montana’s harsh winter landscape proves fertile ground for Carty’s introspective, subtle prose—the naturalistic imagery destabilizes Jamison’s inner narration and his opinion of how he’s lived his life: “There was more here than the absence of the city…in the same way that a deer hidden in tall grass vanishes maddingly when viewed with purpose and intent, he had been frustrated in his inability to see all that was here to be seen.” Some readers may find the book’s ending unsatisfying, but it offers the characters the kinds of choices their lives hadn’t yet provided.
A quietly potent rumination on the costs, and rewards, of how life ends and begins again.Pub Date: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781771838832
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
Share your opinion of this book
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
by Alison Espach ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 30, 2024
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
42
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
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
Share your opinion of this book
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.