A thoughtful story of how troubles can spark opportunities.
In Mills’ novel, a woman’s placid life in a small town is unsettled by her husband’s infidelity and the disclosure of extraordinary family secrets.
Cyd Carr, in her early 50s, lives a placid life in small-town Lola, Florida. However, her life is turned upside down when she’s in a car accident and realizes that her husband, Loren, was a passenger in the vehicle that hit hers—and he’s accompanied by a woman, Mila Menendez, with whom he’s been having an affair. In the aftermath, Cyd holds out hope that her marriage of 28 years can be salvaged. To that end, she travels with Loren to Phoenix, where a lawyer has summoned her to collect an inheritance after the death of her Aunt Mae. However, during the journey, Cyd learns that Loren hasn’t been forthcoming about his affair; it lasted much longer than he originally said it did, and Mila ended it, not him. It’s also clear that he was in love with his mistress. Devastated, Cyd leaves her spouse in Dallas and heads to Arizona on her own. Mills’ emotionally sensitive drama poignantly expresses Cyd’s bewildered anguish throughout: “They were happy. Forty-eight hours ago, if someone had asked, she would have said she had a good marriage. They had a happy marriage. That’s what she would have said.” Later, Cyd not only inherits some money and a house in Sedona, but also discovers remarkable truths about Mae and other members of her family, which prompts her to rethink her childhood. Over the course of the novel, Mills powerfully evokes an atmosphere of menace and destruction; while Cyd’s away from Lola, for instance, her home is threatened by a “mighty and vengeful” hurricane. She’s memorably depicted as a woman who’s lived a small, safe life, but who’s suddenly forced to reinvent herself and boldly start anew. Overall, it’s an engrossing and often moving novel about the ways in which disaster can create newfound fortitude.
A thoughtful story of how troubles can spark opportunities.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781647429263
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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