An often haunting story about memory and loss.
A novel that offers a multilayered exploration of the afterlife, grief, and moving on.
Sherman opens each chapter of this novel with a fortune-cookie message, and the first summarizes a major theme of the novel: “Sift through your past to get a better idea of the present.” The plot revolves around 59-year-old Caroline Gregorian, a writer unraveling the threads of her tragic history. Nineteen years ago, she lost her husband, Michael, and parents, Bernice and Norman, in a car accident. Since then, she seems to have moved on, having found a different and possibly better partner in her current husband, Philip, and successfully raised her children Julie and Mark with him while advancing her writing career. As she sorts through her attic at Thanksgiving, she’s stunned to encounter her lost family members as ghosts. As they speak of a mysterious afterlife, they seem to be exactly how she remembers them—at least at first. However, she’s soon forced to rethink her family history and marriage, as each loved one reveals a different secret that involves a misunderstanding that they now endeavor to reconcile. Meanwhile, Caroline and Philip must address issues involving money and their own relationship. Over the course of this novel, Sherman brings the past into contact with the present to illustrate what it means to come to terms with one history and truly let go of the past. Supernatural elements, introduced early on, create a sense of mystery and suspense, while a poignant, deeply emotional tone is established well through Caroline’s perspective. Although some of the characters’ secrets feel clichéd, others make for intriguing plot twists. The book’s interest in showing parents and children exploring gender identity is admirable, but the execution feels trite and unrealistic; in particular, Caroline’s struggle with a nonbinary character’s pronouns feels overdone. Overall, though, Sherman’s prose style shows appealing moments of wit, and she successfully conveys a key message: “Everyone has a different version of the past, even if you were in the same room.”
An often haunting story about memory and loss.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64663-840-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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