A provocative, quietly foreboding examination of the teen idol industrial machine, arriving at the perfect cultural moment.
A turn-of-the-millennium pop star recounts her disillusioning journey to the top of the charts in this self-assured debut.
In 1990 New Jersey, 10-year-old Amber Young sings Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart” at a local talent show, not realizing an agent is in the audience—or that this performance will direct the trajectory of her life. She lands a spot in the girl group Cloud9, where she befriends Gwen Morris, who soon goes solo and convinces Amber she’s good enough to do the same. Separately, the two achieve quick success, and their friendship continues via voicemails sent from recording studios and tour buses around the world. Both Amber’s intimate first-person narration and Gwen’s messages reveal a worrisome loss of autonomy, their bodies becoming hypersexualized vehicles for others’ desires, power plays, and entertainment. When Amber starts touring with massively famous boy band ETA, she grows close to one of the guys, Wes Kingston, despite knowing the media is desperate to see him with Gwen. This won’t end well, which we know from the get-go; the book opens with a flash from 2002, when Amber is on the cover of Rolling Stone talking about her role in a scandalous Wes and Gwen breakup. Amber’s fame comes quickly and easily, so the tension isn’t in her pursuit of it but rather in anticipation of its consequences. Readers who lived through the Britney vs. Christina TRL era will likely feel an ambivalence similar to Amber’s own. The pop craze was fun, but at what cost? It’s never quite clear how Amber feels about the music of it all: She says singing allows her to “understand the purpose of gods,” but it takes up so little space on the page it’s easy to forget that’s what she’s famous for. Then again, maybe that confusion is the point. While memoirs from former teen stars are starting to expose behind-the-scenes exploitation and abuse, this fictionalization brings readers close through the kind of rich, immersive worldbuilding and gut-punch depth of feeling that only a masterful novelist can provide.
A provocative, quietly foreboding examination of the teen idol industrial machine, arriving at the perfect cultural moment.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781250333469
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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