Complete with a section of travel tips and a favorite recipe, Palmisano’s novel coddles the reader like an airplane blanket.
An American consumed with wanderlust comes to a Greek island where she feels strangely at home among the locals.
Palmisano’s debut overflows with the features of romantic escapism: beautiful scenery, delicious food, women empowered by gentle magical powers, and a variety of romances in which love must conquer complications. Since graduating from college seven years ago, the plucky heroine, Marjory “Jory” St. James, has worked as a waitress (proudly eschewing her estranged father’s wealth) to pay for her frequent travels. She heads, purposely without a guidebook, to the Greek island of Naxos and finds lodging in a village called Potamia. Oddly and too conveniently, she is the only tourist in a town touristy enough that an international boutique hotel chain wants to purchase the guesthouse where she’s staying. Jory becomes enmeshed in the lives of three villagers with special powers received from female ancestors and a magic stream. Guesthouse owner Cressida Thermopolis’ cooking imparts emotions with transformative powers to those who partake. Elderly Mago’s power lies in her ability to sew exactly what the wearer needs. Unhappily married Nefeli sees “portents.” But the three women are also suffering, Cressida emotionally immobilized after her young husband’s death, Mago afraid to marry her longtime lover because she might have cancer, and Nefeli unable to express love to or receive love from her husband. If Jory’s full-throttle acceptance by the others as they eat exquisite meals and share emotional wisdom is implausibly easy, plausibility is not the point. Meanwhile, Jory meets the obligatory handsome stranger, another seemingly footloose American traveler, and their mutual attraction overpowers her self-proclaimed desire to avoid emotional entanglement. But is he to be trusted? And will all these women come to grips with their fears and their powers to shape their futures? Is there any doubt?
Complete with a section of travel tips and a favorite recipe, Palmisano’s novel coddles the reader like an airplane blanket.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757499
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
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
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