A well-researched if not entirely immersive novel about the difficulties of an artistic life.
In Beece’s debut historical novel, the woman behind painter Vincent van Gogh’s posthumous success takes center stage.
In Amsterdam, 1887, the bookish and ambitious Johanna Bonger still lives at home with her parents even though she’s 25 and well on her way to spinsterhood. Her family wants her to marry, but Jo is more interested in moving to Paris, where she can live independently, away from parental expectations. Her brother introduces her to Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch art dealer who lives in Paris and has a particular fondness for the new style of impressionist painting. After only two meaningful discussions about the wonders of art, Theo proposes—and Jo, much to her own surprise, says yes. Theo’s troublesome brother, Vincent, a talented but unsuccessful artist prone to erratic outbursts and unpredictable behavior, does not get along with Jo—each resents how the other lays claim to Theo’s attention. It soon becomes clear that Vincent is a painter of rare and revolutionary talent. As Jo becomes more deeply enmeshed in the lives of the Van Goghs, she comes to realize it may fall to her, not Theo (who suffers an emotional and physical decline), to bring Vincent’s vision to the world. The novel shifts among the perspectives of these three characters (as well as a few others), and the author succeeds in bringing the famous painter, his brother, and his sister-in-law to life. The author’s prose is workmanlike, and she has the unfortunate tendency to put thoughts in the heads of her characters that feel a bit too history-minded, like “The turn of the century was coming slowly here in Amsterdam, but culture was changing a decade faster in Paris,” or “Jo was proud to be among the new thinkers who found these old ways of profiting at the expense of others to be immoral and cruel.” Even so, Van Gogh fans will likely delight in learning about the woman who was so central to preserving his legacy and who forged a culture-shifting path—as a founding member of the Women’s Socialist Party and champion of Van Gogh’s work—of her own.
A well-researched if not entirely immersive novel about the difficulties of an artistic life.Pub Date: March 24, 2022
ISBN: 9781665720359
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2023
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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