A humorous ode to the value of community in fending off the world’s cruelties.
In Ferrone’s comic novel, a short-statured teacher attempts to reinvent his life following his divorce.
Five-foot-two Julian Leon Rainflower Dickerson was born two months prematurely on a commune (in a hot tub), which explains, in part, his small proportions. By the time he was a teenager, the straitlaced Julian was fed up enough with his hippie parents to go live with his grandparents. He now works as an English teacher at a New England prep school and finds himself unhappily married to a woman who cruelly insists on wearing high heels. His only friends are his large black Lab, Barcus, and his lesbian colleague, Lois Coronetti Carson, who teaches gym. His balanced life becomes upset by the dual intrusions of his wife, Amanda, who demands a divorce, and his most flirtatious student, the precocious Donna Capucci, who seeks his attention outside of class. When a bus crash during a field trip lands Julian in the hospital, co-chaperone Lois comes up with a plan to sue the prep school and walk away with a large settlement. (The two also move into their favorite bar after losing their jobs.) Will this finally be Julian’s opportunity to get out from under the “higher ups” who have long dominated his life, or is he about to fly too close to the sun? Ferrone’s humor is dark and dry, as here when Julian agrees to meet with a lawyer about suing the school (largely to counterbalance his divorce woes): “Their appointment happened to fall on the same day that he received a call from his divorce attorney informing him that Amanda had sold the house to her mother for ten dollars and had expressed a willingness to split the proceeds with Julian despite the fact that she was under no legal obligation to do so.” Despite the book’s surface cynicism, the colorful assortment of allies Julian draws to him provides the comic story with an earnest heart.
A humorous ode to the value of community in fending off the world’s cruelties.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2021
ISBN: 9781777373689
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Life to Paper Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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