The author has a deft comic touch, but he plays softball with a major league subject.
Kokoris (Sister North, 2003, etc.) tweaks the zeitgeist in this gently humorous novel about an out-of-work executive.
Both the recession and office politics play a part in the summary dismissal of 50-year-old Charlie Baker, managing head of Chicago’s largest ad agency. Soon narcissistic, tantrum-throwing Charlie is spending his days at an outplacement firm for fired executives. At first he resists the counsel of transition consultant Ned, the kind of Hush Puppy-wearing, middle-management schlump he has always disdained. With his hyper personality and manic wit, Charlie is a dead ringer for Jeremy Piven’s Ari on Entourage, but Kokoris paints Ned and Charlie’s fellow job seekers in the outplacement office with a complexity that arouses painful empathy for their desperation. Increasingly humbled, Charlie begins to follow Ned’s advice and even becomes his friend. Meanwhile Charlie’s employment crisis brings to the surface a deeper crisis on the domestic front. For years so absorbed in his work that he barely paid attention to wife Donna and 16-year-old son Kyle, Charlie has become a stranger in his own home. Before he can bring himself to tell Donna he’s lost his job, she announces she is taking a trip to Maine, alone. While she’s gone, slacker Kyle tells Charlie that Donna knows he’s been fired. Kyle also gives him reason to suspect that his neglect may have driven her into an affair. But Kokoris is not the sort of writer who puts his hero in serious harm’s way. True-blue Donna just wants him to pay a little husbandly attention. While the spouses tentatively reconnect, Charlie gets to know and appreciate Kyle, a budding basketball star who reads Pynchon and plays the piano. When a lucrative but high-pressure opportunity crops up, Charlie is faced with a choice neither surprising nor particularly realistic in today’s economy.
The author has a deft comic touch, but he plays softball with a major league subject.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-36548-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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
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