While well-written, with a clear narrative voice, the novel fails to produce much more than superficial revelations.
A man's unexpected death brings his children from five different marriages together for the first, and most likely last, time.
Pittard (The Fates Will Find Their Way, 2011) throws a family (that doesn’t consider itself a family) together and watches them fall apart. The narrator, Kate, and her two close siblings, Nell and Elliot, came from their father’s first marriage. After their mother died, their dad embraced adultery, jumping from one wife to the next, cheating on them and having children with all of them. As a result of their father’s behavior, the three “original siblings,” who weren't in touch with him when he died, believe strongly in being faithful. In spite of that, Kate recently cheated on her husband, Peter, who now wants a child, despite having had a vasectomy earlier in their marriage, and has asked her to consider adoption. She hasn’t told her siblings yet, and she’s also keeping another secret from them: She blew through the money she made early in her career as a screenwriter, and then some, and now lives almost completely off her husband’s generosity while she pays back $48,000 in credit-card debt. She explains, “I was raised thinking we had money, comfort. I was raised thinking that same money and comfort would filter naturally into my own bank account.” Over the course of her father’s funeral, Kate begins to realize how much she has in common with him. Only when interacting with her youngest half sister, Mindy, does she seem to truly care that her self-absorption could hurt others. But, this, in the end, may not be enough of a payoff for the reader.
While well-written, with a clear narrative voice, the novel fails to produce much more than superficial revelations.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-5361-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
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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