Lively insights give way to predictable made-for-TV-movie fare.
Listfield (Waiting to Surface, 2007, etc.) combines domestic melodrama with murder mystery in this tale of a Manhattan couple whose secrets almost cause their downfall.
PR executive Lisa and financial journalist Sam have been happily married since college. Narrating their story, Lisa is at pains to describe the family as virtuous Upper East Siders: Although she sends her two daughters to a private school for a superior education, she is uncomfortable with the snobbish Upper East Side mothers. Life starts to unravel when she hears a suspicious message on Sam’s cell phone and overhears a more suspicious conversation. She begins to suspect that Sam, who claims he is working on a big story to cement his shaky career, might be having an affair. Her own job security becomes uncertain when her boss sells to a large out-of-town firm that brings in a consultant who appears determined to undermine Lisa’s authority. Lisa confides all to Deirdre, a boutique owner who’s been her best friend since college. Then Lisa, Sam and Deirdre have dinner with Deirdre’s old flame Jack, now a lawyer in Boston, who’s in town to interview at a Manhattan firm. Romantic sparks fly between the former lovers, and Jack, claiming his marriage has failed, enlists Lisa’s help to renew his relationship with Deirdre, who is currently confused about her long affair with an untrustworthy, globetrotting photographer. Listfield does a nice job showing delicate marital tensions between Sam and Lisa, and she also creates a compelling, vaguely mysterious counterpoint character in Deirdre. But Deirdre’s murder sucks all the energy and believability out of the novel. It’s obvious who’s guilty, so Lisa’s semi-sleuthing makes her seem at best dense, at worst self-absorbed and meddlesome. The too-neatly wrapped-up ending, in which Sam’s journalistic coup reaps him a book deal for big bucks, may be the least believable aspect of all.
Lively insights give way to predictable made-for-TV-movie fare.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7671-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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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