Like most family road trips, the novel is sometimes rollicking fun, sometimes unbearably annoying; but the trip goes on too...
Kokoris (The Pursuit of Other Interests, 2009) aims to balance issue-oriented domestic drama with levity in this story about a middle-aged man who sets off in the family van for a life-changing road trip with his autistic son.
John Nichols, a 57-year-old divorced high school teacher, former college basketball player, and one-book novelist, sets off from Wilton, Illinois, in his Honda Odyssey with his 19-year-old son, Ethan. They’re heading to Charleston, South Carolina, where John’s oldest child, conservative Republican bond trader Karen, is getting married. John still pines for his ex-wife, Mary, a lawyer who kicked him out after his one foolish fall into adultery two years earlier. She shares custody of Ethan and is waiting impatiently in Charleston, annoyed that John risks missing the wedding. But given John’s heavy-duty packing and the effort he puts into Ethan’s goodbyes to his favorite places in Wilton, it's obvious that the trip is bigger than John has let on. Traveling with Ethan, who has the emotional and mental capacity of a 3-year-old, is difficult. Managing the boy's mood swings and short attention span requires lots of pit stops, lots of Cracker Barrel meals, and three talking teddy bears. Shortly after John’s middle daughter, Mindy, a successful actress, joins John and Ethan in Tennessee, she tells him that Karen’s called off her wedding. They continue on to Charleston anyway, and there, John’s secret comes out: without telling Mary, he's signed Ethan up for an unexpectedly available spot at a residential treatment center in Maine that he and Mary both liked when they visited the year before. The Nichols women are furious, but they decide to accompany John to Maine to decide what they think of the place themselves. While the miles pile up, John, Mary, and their daughters sort out what's best for Ethan and their own futures.
Like most family road trips, the novel is sometimes rollicking fun, sometimes unbearably annoying; but the trip goes on too long, and the clashes, jokes, and revelations become as repetitious and tedious as the endless pit stops and chain-restaurant meals.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-03605-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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