A stirring collection of linked tales with a deep sense of place.
A volume of short stories revolves around a prominent family in a Kentucky college town.
The Collins girls have had it rough. Meredith’s husband, long-suffering from bipolar disorder, died in a car accident and left her with three daughters, ages 12, 8, and 5. The oldest, Diana, has always been the responsible one; Cecily is the one everyone worries about; the youngest, Molly, is the child who loves horses. Radiating out from these girls is a network that threads through Bowling Green, Kentucky, a city known for its deep subterranean caves. Indeed, caves are everywhere in these tales. Meredith is a geologist and caver. Her deceased husband, David, was a professor who had his students act out Plato’s The Allegory of the Cavein class. In the title story, which features Cecily reading letters sent to her by her family during a stint in rehab, she instructs her mother to “think of me as a mammoth cave. Your letters just flutter through the stale air, talk echoes, memories suffocate.” Some of the tales in this linked collection focus on one or more of the Collins girls at various times in their lives while others follow characters from outside the family. There’s the woman who babysits them when they are young, a perennial student who writes a short story based on things she read in Meredith’s diary. There’s the girls’ uncle, a solitary hunter who can’t quite figure out what to do with himself when he isn’t in the woods. One story is narrated by Molly’s classmate at Western Kentucky University who struggles to navigate the campus—physically and socially—in her wheelchair. Another follows Cecily’s old boyfriend, now a third-grade teacher, taking his class on a field trip to a cave and meditating on the past. Like spelunkers stumbling through a cave system, readers never know what new chamber they might end up in, only that it connects, somehow, back to the entrance.
Olmsted’s painterly prose evokes both the Kentucky landscape and the personalities who reside in it. Here the Collins girls’ uncle spots a rare flock of swans in the sky: “I hear them before I see the swans flying overhead. Trees are so thick, I glimpse only the right leg of the V. Put them on water and they’re self-interested honkers, but when they fly, their wings beat together like it’s one massive body sailing over.” The author has a talent for establishing characters and dynamics quickly, immersing readers in the interpersonal dramas that populate these pages: between siblings, between generations, between romantic partners, and between strangers. She also succeeds at incorporating a sense of local history into the work. Where weaknesses exist, they are mostly inherent in the structure. Not all of the stories really work on their own—readers will always be looking for ways new characters connect to the Collinses—and the book lacks the satisfying narrative arc or the deep character study of a novel. Even so, scene by scene, this volume makes for an engaging and sometimes moving group portrait.
A stirring collection of linked tales with a deep sense of place.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 202
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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