A heartfelt rumination on the touching, often heartrending relationships between farm owners and their pets.
A collection of poetry reminiscences about life on a bucolic stretch of farmland.
At the outset of Flaugher’s work of prose poetry—termed an “anthem” here—the unnamed protagonist is a young woman who arrives, by virtue of marriage, on a small farm. Totally unaccustomed to the rural lifestyle, she is at first taken aback by the amount of manual labor that she and her husband must undertake to make their new home livable. The duties range from small tasks to the “six inches of manure” that must be cleared from the chicken house, a chore that yields the discovery of a desiccated feline, “frozen forever in a hideous posture of agony or madness. Who can say of what the cat perished, poison, perhaps.” Such experiences with small animals form mostly the entire work. Flaugher’s early chapters center on the eventual menagerie of barn cats with which the protagonist and her husband control the rodent population, with their most notable feline being the aptly named Goliath, a big-headed bruiser who runs the roost on the farm. The couple endure the time-worn difficulties of pet ownership, each bygone friend buried tenderly by the strawberry patch he liked to snack on or the tree beneath which he loved to nap. The cycle of death and rebirth as played out among the farm animals becomes the defining experience of both spouses’ lives and readers’ while consuming the work. In such moments as when the couple’s dog Beau pees on a pal’s leg, readers will understand why the duo goes on to choose the canine and cut the friend out altogether. While the rhythms and realities of Flaugher’s account of farm life eventually become predictable—most of these chapters feel interchangeable—the author displays a deft knack for poetic, lyrical prose that will keep readers going with its brand of deceptive simplicity. No massive revelations are forthcoming from this book, but readers in search of an honest rendering of American pastoral life will be grateful to have spent their time on the farm.
A heartfelt rumination on the touching, often heartrending relationships between farm owners and their pets.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798308583110
Page Count: 137
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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