An excruciatingly slow novel in which sentimental self-absorption rules despite nods to social issues like child abuse and...
Two strangers, each harboring guilty sorrow over past losses, offer each other solace in this introspective novel from Reed (Things We Set on Fire, 2013).
Recently separated from her Irish husband, Niall, who has moved from their home in Ireland to Australia for reasons that may or may not have to do with her alcoholism, 35-year-old writer June returns to property on the Oregon coast where she was born and which she’s inherited from her grandparents, who raised her. Alone in the carriage house where she lived with her father until his suicide when she was 7, she struggles daily to work on her new book and avoid drink. Sight unseen she hires a contractor named Jameson, known to be “unorthodox,” to renovate the main house, which her grandparents built from a Sears kit in 1940. Jameson currently lives across the state with his wife, Sarah Anne, a potter, and their 2-year-old foster child, Ernest. The couple used to live in June’s coastal community, but they left three years earlier after their 7-year-old twins were fatally shot by a teenager in a convenience store. While caring for Ernest is renewing Sarah Anne’s energy, Jameson remains paralyzed. He takes June’s job out of financial desperation. Although their phone conversations are fraught with significant undercurrents from the beginning, Jameson does not actually see June for the first 150 of the novel’s pages. Instead Reed describes in every way possible June's and Jameson’s emotional wounds to prove they are soul mates in sensitivity. When the two finally spend time together, Jameson's desire to talk to June, to ask her questions—in stark contrast to his tiptoeing silence around Sarah Anne—matches June’s desire to share even those secrets she kept from patient, loving Niall. But can either find a way beyond loss?
An excruciatingly slow novel in which sentimental self-absorption rules despite nods to social issues like child abuse and gun violence.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-81735-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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