After her realistic examination of new motherhood and marital strain, Weiner pulls her punches with a too-neat ending.
Weiner (Good in Bed, 2001; In Her Shoes, 2002) follows four Philadelphia women as they face the challenges, from trivial to profound, of new motherhood, becoming friends in the process.
Becky, Kelly, and Ayinde meet at a pregnancy yoga class. At the same time, Lia, an actress who has returned home to Philly to come to grips with her baby’s death, begins following Becky around and leaving her baby gifts (Weiner overlooks the stalker-creepiness of this behavior) until she joins the friendship circle as a kind of emotional counterweight to keep the others’ problems in perspective. In Weiner’s symmetry, each woman starts out with an issue and each faces a challenge. Lia’s challenge is obviously her loss; her underlying issue is her mother’s emotional coldness. Becky’s issue is weight. A restaurant owner married to a nice Jewish doctor, Becky’s challenge is her obnoxious, overbearing mother-in-law. Overachieving Kelly’s issue is the poverty she has overcome. An event planner who has orchestrated her life for maximum security, Kelly is thrown a curve when her husband gets laid off from his corporate job and becomes a couch potato. For Ayinde, beautiful and from a privileged background as the daughter of an actor and a model, being biracial has been a lifelong struggle. Now her basketball star husband is slapped with a paternity suit by another woman. But love conquers all. Becky’s husband miraculously grows a spine and quits being a mama’s boy. Kelly and her husband learn to communicate and support each other in following their real professional dreams. Ayinde’s husband proves he is a devoted father, and his former paramour visits Ayinde to assure her how much he really loves Ayinde. Lia finds peace with her loss, realizes that her mother has always loved her, and reunites with her husband.
After her realistic examination of new motherhood and marital strain, Weiner pulls her punches with a too-neat ending.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-7009-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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