bookshelf

HAUSFRAU

Name: HAUSFRAU
Author: Jill Alexander Essbaum
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9753-8

by Jill Alexander Essbaum ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 24, 2015

A smart book that entertains page by page but doesn’t add up to anything larger.

bookshelf

Between caring for three children, visiting a Jungian analyst and taking a German class, Anna wouldn’t seem to have much time for extramarital liaisons, but like her namesake, Madame Karenina, she manages.

Anna, who’s American, has lived near Zurich with her Swiss banker husband, Bruno, for nine years yet still can’t speak the language. She gets by in elementary German but is barely competent at Schwiizerdutsch, the local variant that “leaps from the back of the throat like an infected tonsil trying to escape.” She doesn’t have a job or a bank account; her parents are dead; and she has only one friend, another expatriate she doesn’t even like very well. Her husband is cold and distant, her mother-in-law “was usually never blatantly unkind.” That double negative is vintage Anna, who parses her feelings into ever finer distinctions. A few years ago, she drifted into an affair with another American, who went home without knowing he’d fathered her third child. Now she’s studying German, which her analyst suggested as a way to become more connected to the world, though Doktor Messerli surely didn’t mean she should jump into bed with a Scotsman she met in class. “Anna loved and didn’t love sex. Anna needed and didn’t need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted.” As Anna floats through her life and this novel, taking endless train rides and insomniac walks, the story is interrupted by philosophical conversations with her shrink: “What’s the difference between passivity and neutrality?” is a typical gambit. There’s plenty of tension—will Anna get caught?—but it’s hard to be invested in the life of a woman who doesn’t care much about it herself.

A smart book that entertains page by page but doesn’t add up to anything larger.

Pub Date: March 24, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9753-8

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- PERSPECTIVES
Looking for Intrigue? Hop on a Train.

- PROFILES
Jill Alexander Essbaum

bookshelf

BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

bookshelf

Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.