“Loving your children is easy, liking them is a bonus,” is as much of a moral as Eclair draws, but it goes down easily in...
Chick-lit grows up in this saga of two complicated families linked by a drunken one-night stand.
Scarlett O’Hara could have warned these women: Life goes on even if you’ve lost the man. In the second novel by stand-up comedian Eclair (Camberwell Beauty, 2006), 25-year-old Nina has landed a boyfriend, Joe, but now finds herself saddled with a toddler, two not-quite-step-kids (she and Joe aren’t any closer to marriage) and severe envy of her club-hopping single friends. Across London, Joe’s ex-wife, Hils, has begun to spread her wings with the publication of a memoir, Diary of a Divorcee, but aches acutely for her lost life, while clueless Alice refuses to see the truth about her cheating husband, Guy, or their unhappy children. Everyone is in transition, and despite the rather formulaic storytelling, Eclair builds suspense, particularly around Joe and Nina’s ambivalence about their not-yet-formalized union and their devil’s-spawn of a toddler, Freya. The domestic comedy rolls into action when Joe and Nina, along with all his children, end up at the same Italian villa as Alice’s brood. Alice’s unfaithful spouse, Guy, doesn’t handle his separation from his mistress well, and their troubled younger son starts acting up. The author indulges in some chick-lit excess, personifying the alternating narrators through their ease with profanity and using brand-names as shorthand for description. But she keeps the Manolo Blahnik references in check, and the voices, including that of insecure 13-year-old Tabitha, ring true. There’s little surprise as to how this will play out, although Eclair does keep two secrets to the end.
“Loving your children is easy, liking them is a bonus,” is as much of a moral as Eclair draws, but it goes down easily in her breezy, readable prose.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7515-3605-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Time Warner UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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
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
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