Predictable, but sweet-natured and mildly absorbing.
Rescued from San Francisco Bay with no memory of her former life, Lucie Walker tries to reconnect with her fiance and unearth the dark secrets from her past.
Amnesia, that improbable staple of countless mysteries, here receives a 21st-century makeover as “dissociative fugue”—which means, explains the friendly doctor at San Francisco General, “it was brought on by some kind of emotional trauma.” That’s easy to believe when Lucie’s fiance, Grady Goodall, comes to take her home to Seattle, twitching with anxiety and racked with guilt about the big fight they had right before Lucie disappeared. It quickly becomes clear, as Lucie tries to jog her memories by talking with Grady and the neighbors she once shunned, that her pre-fugue self was an unpleasant control freak. Old Lucie, a high-tech headhunter, latched onto Grady while recruiting him for his product development job at Boeing and ran his life ever after: directing what he ate, how he dressed and how they lived—which meant talking as little as possible about Lucie’s dead parents, her hated Aunt Helen or the three scars on her thigh that look like cigarette burns. Insecure Grady, son of an impoverished Native American fisherman who died when he was 8, was fine with being bossed around, until Lucie got so obsessive about planning their wedding that he lost his temper and provoked a screaming attack that he fears (correctly) set off her dissociative fugue. The bulk of the novel shows New Lucie, way nicer than she was before, agonizing over whether Grady still loves her (which is blindingly obvious to everyone but her) and slowly reconstructing her past with the reluctant help of Aunt Helen. Heavy hinting makes the final revelation unsurprising, though still shocking. Nor is there much unexpected about either Lucie or Grady, though both are agreeable enough to hold readers’ attention through Shortridge’s undemanding fifth novel.
Predictable, but sweet-natured and mildly absorbing.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8483-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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