A sensitive and moving tale of family tragedy and renewal.
A novel focuses on a family fractured by a series of shocks and secrets.
Eddy Kimes, one of the main characters in Seaburn’s tale, is a longtime supervisor for a cable company. Although he’s lived through many changes of company ownership, as the story opens, he’s increasingly worried that this latest pause in work is actually the dreaded L-word: layoff. This problem comes on top of the concern now undergirding his entire life: His wife, Gayle, a tax accountant with a booming business, has recently been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and suddenly she’s requiring medicine, extra care, and chemotherapy. This development brings home their two adult children, Richie and Sandy, who have become almost strangers in the time since they moved out of the family house. “There were Facebook posts and texts and the rare visits, but it was different in ways that he couldn’t put into words,” Eddy reflects. “All he knew was that they had become warm, affable acquaintances, people you enjoyed but didn't know.” Richie and Sandy are carrying their own baggage. While Eddy is trying to hold the situation together alone (“Sometimes you have to keep things to yourself,” he thinks, “otherwise, everything might crash into a million pieces on the floor”), he’s receiving a surprising amount of support from his visits to the statue of Christ the Consoler at the nearby First Presbyterian Church. At one point in Seaburn’s engaging story, readers are told: “Every person’s suffering is singular, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise.” And yet the tale’s main theme belies this sentiment; the book is a poignant and convincing portrayal of how suffering can be softened by both faith and community. The author’s dramatization of the day-to-day realities of living with cancer is etched with fine details and deep compassion. Without any fanfare, this element of the novel comes to dominate the others, tilting a faith and relationship tale into an illness and coping story that explores powerful emotions.
A sensitive and moving tale of family tragedy and renewal.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68-433764-4
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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