Moderately entertaining but very thin.
The once-wealthy, forever-entitled British aristocrats who lost their ancestral mansion in the crash of 2008 in House of Trelawney (2020) face new challenges in 2016-2017.
The focus here is on Ayesha, the illegitimate daughter rejected by the rest of the Trelawney family. Disdain turned to hatred after her wealthy husband, sleazy stock manipulator Sir Thomlinson Sleet, bought 800-year-old Trelawney Castle for her as a wedding present. Ayesha didn’t marry for love, but she did think Sleet would bring her security, a belief that proves unfounded when he becomes infatuated with a sexy cryptocurrency con artist and casually decides to dump Ayesha and get custody of their 5-year-old daughter…just because. Insecure, status-seeking Sleet is a monster painted with such broad strokes he might as well have a mustache to twirl, and the rest of Rothschild’s characterizations are equally clichéd. Despite her first-class degree and a prestigious art history prize, Ayesha comes across for 90% of the novel as a helpless victim; her only family ally, the Honourable Anthony Scott, is a stereotypical elderly gay man (an interior decorator, no less), and secondary characters like “aging minor royal” Princess Amelia are given to credulity-straining remarks such as, “In the good old days, ‘help’ had nowhere else to go….Now they have such highfalutin ideas. I blame the Chinese.” To give Rothschild her due, she crafts an enjoyably complicated narrative that eventually enables Ayesha to stymie some of Sleet’s nefarious plans and convince her hostile relatives she’s not so bad after all. Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, multiple financial shenanigans, and a clever scam involving risqué paintings hidden away by Iran’s puritanical regime are among the plot elements that will keep readers turning pages to find out what happens next. The abundance of machinations by a horde of not especially memorable characters, however, makes it likely that little of it will be remembered once the last chapter is finished.
Moderately entertaining but very thin.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593536582
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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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