Intimate and touching, albeit not revelatory.
A woman faces the void in her life and home after the death of her longtime companion.
“He was a big man and he leaves a big space,” writes Christina about the recently deceased Rudy, a Vienna-born composer who shared her life for 28 years. At five o’clock, when Rudy would punctually begin grinding ice and slicing lime for her gin and soda, their farmhouse in upstate New York seems especially empty. Throughout, Frances Halsband’s line drawings of objects like Rudy’s chair, his metronome, and “Ralph the knife” (for the limes) underscore the text’s keening sense of absence as a palpable physical presence. Like Godwin (Evensong, 1990, etc.), Christina is a southern-born, divorced novelist, veteran of a teaching stint at Iowa; these similarities to her creator, along with the dedication to composer Robert Starer, Godwin’s own partner, who died in 2001, suggest that this is not so much fiction as an autobiographical meditation on love and loss cast in the form the author knows best. A few carefully selected memories reveal Rudy’s arrogance and frequently awful social behavior as well as his warmth and charm. Godwin’s experience and skill (this is her 11th novel) show in the absence of sentimentality, the seamless shiftings of time as Christina remembers incidents from her past, and the nicely calibrated mix of tragedy and comedy. The predominant tone is certainly sad, but there’s a surprising amount of humor, particularly in some very maladroit sympathy notes (“Beth is on her way to becoming an accomplished musician. Had it not been for Rudy’s prompting, I might not have acted so quickly”). The story does feel rather slight, but presumably it’s intended to be a personal statement, not the last word on death or loss. As Rudy once remarked about his work, “I used to try to be original. Now I try to be clear and essential.”
Intimate and touching, albeit not revelatory.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-46102-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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