An artfully crafted portrayal of a woman who learns about herself as she weighs an unexpected choice.
A midlife pregnancy triggers an executive decision in this debut drama.
Marketing professional Jeanne Bridgeton is a vice president at Salientific and has connections to its shot-callers. However, she doesn’t yet have what she’s always wanted: a chief officer title. She also finds herself having to make a choice that could have major consequences—not just for her, but also for other key characters in the story. She’s pregnant, and she’s debating whether she should get an abortion. At first, she ponders the question as dispassionately as she would a budget-line item—until her doctor tells her that, because she’s 48, this could be her last opportunity to give birth. She never wanted to have a child before, but the finality of the decision causes her to vacillate almost daily until her state’s 24-week legal abortion limit. She knows that the father is either Vince—a major investor in Salientific and her boyfriend of a year—or Jake, the company’s troubled CEO, with whom she had a one-night stand. Her deepest concern, however, isn’t paternity, as marriage is not in her DNA. Instead, she’s anxious about the risk of the baby having developmental challenges, and whether gambling on motherhood would be irresponsible. Another wild card also consumes her: Did her father die from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease? If so, would Jeanne’s child be at risk of inheriting the disease—or of becoming an orphan at a young age? Cohen offers an adeptly written genetic detective story in this novel. In Jeanne, she creates a sympathetic and multidimensional character that avoids outdated stereotypes that one often sees in portrayals of women executives. Readers meet a tough corporate player in the early chapters, but the author develops many other facets of the character over the course of the book, as when she must confront the possibility that her mother, now deceased, lied to her about her father’s condition. The central choice of the novel, which may polarize readers, effectively deals with extremely relevant issues.
An artfully crafted portrayal of a woman who learns about herself as she weighs an unexpected choice.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-600-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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