The question here is how to go on after the death of a loved one with a life so seemingly empty yet still filled with family, friends, and the remnants of years devoted to art.
In this painful sequel to the author’s Renato, the Painter (2012), etc., and the fourth book featuring the Cavalu-Stillamare clan, the artist at 83 confronts the loss of Alba, his beloved wife, a woman with whom he first made love when he was 17. After a plaintive opening lament, “this defective memoir,” written three to four years after the death, tells of how Renato joined the clan as a foundling, one of many passages that largely repeat material from the previous book. Then he returns briefly to the 20 hours of painful torment Alba suffered until death came before shifting again to the succor of other memories, of childhood, family gatherings, and how the family and one’s circle of friends have changed with the passage of time. Grief is an awful thing, and Mirabelli conveys it sometimes awkwardly, as when a paragraph consists of the word “Die” repeated 120 times in Renato’s verbal bid to join his wife. Other times the author is touching and persuasive, as in the inventory of “all her little private things” in a purse he finds while disposing of Alba’s clothing. Renato finds comfort with family and friends and then a new friendship with a barista who lost her husband to brain cancer. What he doesn’t do is paint, something he couldn’t not do in the previous book. But art won’t let him go. A major exhibition begins to take shape, revealing a chance yet for healing a deeply wounded heart.
Repetitions from the previous book and the sometimes-artless echoes of the artist’s grieving inflate and mar what is still an affecting look at memory, loss, and love.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62054-026-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: McPherson & Company
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Named for an imperfectly worded fortune cookie, Hoover's (It Ends with Us, 2016, etc.) latest compares a woman’s relationship with her husband before and after she finds out she’s infertile.
Quinn meets her future husband, Graham, in front of her soon-to-be-ex-fiance’s apartment, where Graham is about to confront him for having an affair with his girlfriend. A few years later, they are happily married but struggling to conceive. The “then and now” format—with alternating chapters moving back and forth in time—allows a hopeful romance to blossom within a dark but relatable dilemma. Back then, Quinn’s bad breakup leads her to the love of her life. In the now, she’s exhausted a laundry list of fertility options, from IVF treatments to adoption, and the silver lining is harder to find. Quinn’s bad relationship with her wealthy mother also prevents her from asking for more money to throw at the problem. But just when Quinn’s narrative starts to sound like she’s writing a long Facebook rant about her struggles, she reveals the larger issue: Ever since she and Graham have been trying to have a baby, intimacy has become a chore, and she doesn’t know how to tell him. Instead, she hopes the contents of a mystery box she’s kept since their wedding day will help her decide their fate. With a few well-timed silences, Hoover turns the fairly common problem of infertility into the more universal problem of poor communication. Graham and Quinn may or may not become parents, but if they don’t talk about their feelings, they won’t remain a couple, either.
Finding positivity in negative pregnancy-test results, this depiction of a marriage in crisis is nearly perfect.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7159-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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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. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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