An eloquent tale about real-life people with difficult problems.
A Massachusetts landlady befriends a tenant’s feisty daughter as they both unravel painful family secrets in this debut novel.
At the age of 72, Lena Barzetti has settled into a comfortable routine in 1999 as the longtime co-owner of a property company in Cambridge. She still goes into the office a few times a week, searches for vacant buildings to buy, and doesn’t get mixed up in other people’s business. A wild young girl arrives on the scene in the form of Kalayla Leeroyce, a biracial, green-eyed spitfire with an outrageously smart mouth. Lena discovers the girl lives with her mother, Maureen, in the same apartment building as she does, right across the hall. Knowing Maureen doesn’t have much money or free time, Lena tries to help Kalayla, including giving her a book with a black girl on the cover. Kalayla is hardly impressed and ruefully notes: “Tomorrow she’d probably be bringing me a book about a white girl ’cause my mama was white.” But she warms up to Lena and her home cooking and suggestions about activities. Kalayla’s father is dead and Maureen has told her that her own family, the O’Rourkes, died in a gas leak. As that story slowly falls apart, Kalayla has to confront painful realities about interracial marriages and their effects in the present day. Similarly, Lena has dealt with loss for decades, including two sons killed in Vietnam and one who disappeared after moving “out West.” Her abusive husband, Joey, is dead, but the bad memories persist, and she longs to find her missing son. Lena, Kalayla, and Maureen live in an old school, rough-and-tumble world, but there is also kindness, which they cling to as they confront the pasts they’ve tried to bury. Nicholas’ carefully layered novel excels at creating lifelike families with complicated, even sordid histories that touch on complex social problems. Marriages can be for business relationships; violence is a fact of life; and people can die young. The way that the author weaves in the memories with the present-day story is skillfully done and lends a good deal of authenticity to the characters. But the book can be slow going at times, and the middle section tends to drag. A more concise writing style would have strengthened the vivid journey toward the fully realized conclusion.
An eloquent tale about real-life people with difficult problems.Pub Date: June 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-49075-5
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Nurturing Light
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2019
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
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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