An enjoyable work that explores one woman’s path to adulthood.
A mathematician finds her life upended by World War I in this historical novel.
Daly, the author of Pre-Raphaelites in Love (1989), recounts the events that led her protagonist, Evelyn Havilland, away from her Northern California hometown and eventually back home. The book opens in 1919 as Evelyn accompanies her shellshocked cousin, Billy, home from Europe, where he was a nurse during the war. In flashbacks, readers learn of Evelyn’s youth as a mathematical prodigy in a working-class home, where she has a contentious relationship with her mother. She goes on to study at Stanford University and becomes a cryptographer during World War I; along the way, she has a romance with a Boston Brahmin and fellow cryptographer named Arthur Bayard. Evelyn hopes to move to the East Coast to marry him and pursue her own career, but, later, her loyalty to her aging parents and to Billy, who’s still suffering from his traumatic wartime experiences, keeps her in California. She takes a job teaching math at her old high school, and although she and Arthur attempt to make their relationship work, he ends up marrying a fellow Bostonian while Evelyn remains single. A later reunion, however, puts lingering questions to rest. Daly does a fine job of capturing her main character’s challenges as she balances familial loyalty and personal independence. (Evelyn is based on the author’s distant relative.) Arthur is a strong romantic foil, and despite what he and Evelyn go through in their relationship, he’s never portrayed as a villain. Even Evelyn’s mother, the most hostile character in the story, is presented sympathetically. The book also ably grapples with the realities of war, particularly when middle-aged Evelyn sees her own students become casualties. Overall, this book is thought-provoking without being excessively contemplative, and the solid plot offers a satisfying resolution.
An enjoyable work that explores one woman’s path to adulthood.Pub Date: April 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950154-03-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The Sager Group
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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