A heartfelt, life-affirming novel tailor-made for readers who love stories of female friendship.
The spirit of a woman killed in a car crash guides her friends and family toward healing in Norman-Carbone’s novel.
When Lynn, a woman in her 30s, and her husband, Scott, set out for a weekend getaway to work on their marriage, a car crash on an icy road ends her life. Lynn’s spirit is stuck in limbo, watching her friends and family struggle in her absence. Scott builds a shrine to her in his room, and her young daughters, Emma and Olivia, begin to forget things about her. Her friends—Jules, Helene, Annie, and Riley—once an inseparable group since high school, drift apart due to secrets and resentments. Able to influence her loved ones as a spirit, Lynn encourages her friends to meet up at her family’s beach cottage on the one-year anniversary of her death to repair their bond and enable them to help Scott and the girls heal. As her friends argue and reminisce, Lynn learns things she never knew and starts to come to terms with her own life and death as her friends find closure. The story is more concerned with the relationships between Lynn and her loved ones than creative depictions of the afterlife (Lynn exists mostly in a shadowy replica of her home on Earth and can communicate with her loved ones more easily than she could in life). The emotional payoff of the story far outweighs the narrative conveniences used to make it happen. The linchpin of the novel is the women’s friend group—including the secrets that pulled them apart and the loyalty to Lynn that brings them back together (“This is what it feels like to be us, girls with a shared past. No matter the circumstances, we always make each other feel warm and cozy—just like home”). The dynamics among the women, both as a group and in separate pairs, are very well developed. The text captures the ways women feel the need to model perfection for each other and illustrates how covering up weaknesses allows them to fester. There is catharsis in the way each of the women, particularly Lynn, allows herself to be imperfect and in the healing that comes from that vulnerability.
A heartfelt, life-affirming novel tailor-made for readers who love stories of female friendship.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781958231067
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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