Not every idea’s a good one.
New York Times best-seller Peterson (The Manny, 2007) presents the tale of a PR executive who experiences a wake-up call when a mysterious woman challenges her to face reality and rearrange her priorities.
At 34, New York City resident Allie Crawford strives to balance a career and family, but lately, she’s been doing the lion’s share of the work. Husband Wade, an ambitious magazine editor, is constantly busy. Allie’s disturbed by his behavior but says little: She’s always validated her self-worth through the eyes of others, particularly the men in her life. Allie’s dad, once her rock, died years ago in a tragic accident, and the circumstances still haunt her. She pushed away best friend and would-be lover James, but she still has unresolved feelings for him. Murray, Allie’s boss, expects her to be available 24/7, and Allie usually accommodates his demands. And Allie’s sick to death of Wade’s endless parties for clientele, but she continues to play the obliging hostess. Wade and Allie have survived rough patches in their marriage up until now, but when a poker chip tumbles out of his pocket and beautiful blonde Jackie shows up and disappears in their lives with genielike dexterity, Allie suspects there’s hanky-panky afoot. But Jackie’s not what Allie expects. Although she dresses to the nines in last year’s runway fashions, she has a head for business and warns Allie that her family’s financial future is in jeopardy. Throwing logic and any semblance of good dialogue and well-defined plot to the wayside, Peterson’s female protagonists embark on a vague cloak-and-dagger investigation encompassing an ex-con parking-lot mogul, a computer networking company, a film festival and some ominous looking SUVs. And, of course, there are other problems: Allie’s having trouble developing a scene for her screenwriting class until Tommy, a fellow student, takes control and encourages Allie to spill her guts about her past, especially all the explicit sexual details, and make out with him. After several more revelations—about Tommy and everyone from Murray’s gardener to the guys in the SUVs—Allie experiences an epiphany: A strong woman doesn’t need a man’s approval to move forward! Readers who make it to the end of this book might experience an epiphany of their own: To engage the reader, stronger writing and a certain degree of credibility are necessary.
Not every idea’s a good one.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228310-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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