A deft, smart, indulgent work that delivers—finally—its necessary integration.
A history of damage and insecurity shapes the lives of two close siblings.
Picking up on the three female characters—sisters Lucy and Bea and their unpredictable mother—from her autobiographical debut, Hideous Kinky (1992), Freud opens this new novel by immediately plunging the reader back into their risky, rackety lifestyle. The family, now expanded to include a young brother, Max, is traveling to Ireland to visit the children’s grandparents, then moves on to stay with other acquaintances there, hitchhiking and scraping by. It’s no different back in England, where the four live for a while in a communal house shared with assorted neighbors, and later in London, as the girls leave home and narrator Lucy attends drama school. Bea, burdened by memories of abuse and abandonment and their mother’s refusal to believe her, conducts a veiled existence, apparently fueled by drugs. Yet, whatever the distance—physical or emotional—between them, the sisters remain close, as Lucy becomes an unsuccessful actor and cycles through a sequence of failed relationships. Freud’s style is episodic and years fly by irregularly, interrupted by richly detailed scenarios—a chaotic Christmas; a trip to New York; a hospital bedside—which often presage another breakup. Men are largely unreliable or faithless (the sisters’ “fearsome, funny” father appears occasionally) and seem unable to satisfy Lucy’s yearning for attachment, continuity, and a place in the world. There’s a monotonous quality to this “and then, and then” narration, as well as the time slips and pattern of appealing men who eventually expose their feet of clay, yet Freud’s storytelling and her bohemian characters exert charm. Best of all, she delivers satisfaction in the book’s full-circle conclusion which connects past and present in several forms, explores abiding psychologies, and addresses the repetitive pattern.
A deft, smart, indulgent work that delivers—finally—its necessary integration.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9780063434479
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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