Highly readable and provocative.
Reminiscent of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life or the movie Sliding Doors, Freitas’ novel explores nine (but certainly not all) possible outcomes when a woman who has never wanted children marries a man who gradually decides he does.
Each of the nine "takes" begins with the same 2006 argument: Luke, a photographer, discovers Rose, a sociologist, is not taking the prenatal vitamins she'd agreed to. How the couple’s argument progresses—to have a baby or not—resolves differently with each telling. In carefully interwoven segments, which multiply as one choice leads to others, events sometimes diverge, sometimes overlap. In some versions Rose has a baby, in others she doesn't. In some cases Luke behaves badly, in some Rose does. Friends and relatives maintain their underlying roles whether they are Rose's or Luke’s parents, lovers for whom Rose or Luke may or may not leave the marriage, a child named Addie who may or may not be born. Luke always has one side of the argument, but the novel belongs to Rose, a feminist academic, and is told from her viewpoint. Although the plotlines continue until 2025, her perspective has a decidedly pre-2020 feel. Rose’s world is full of White professionally and educationally privileged millennial women who talk in philosophical terms about feminism and their battle to maintain control over their lives yet are unapologetically oblivious to real-world politics and suffering. Read today, following the maze of numbered takes becomes an addictive game, highly literate escapism, like watching The Queen’s Gambit. Which is not to say the novel shies away from difficult issues surrounding the position of motherhood in women’s lives. Rose complains she is “damned if she didn’t become a mother and damned if she does become one, too.” In one of her lives she realizes that while she doesn’t like motherhood, she loves her child. And in every version, Rose and her own mother’s relationship rings lovingly, if painfully, true.
Highly readable and provocative.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-98-488059-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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