Eminently skimmable.
An English military wife has difficulty adjusting to her husband’s return from Afghanistan.
When Alexa’s husband, Dan, a career British Army officer, returns from a six-month deployment in Afghanistan, she expects his re-entry to be awkward. However she’s surprised when, instead of relishing his reunion with his wife, twin toddler daughters and teenage stepdaughter, he spends most of his time on base, helping soldiers in his battalion readjust from extended home leave. Alexa, who carries baggage from her own upbringing as the only child of distant parents in the diplomatic corps, can’t communicate her frustrations to Dan without starting an argument. Compounding her plight, Alexa's daughter Isabel is a virtual outcast at her government-sponsored boarding school, where she’s been accused of stealing from another girl. Alexa is also running interference on Dan’s behalf with his father and grandfather (old soldiers themselves) because he’s not ready to deal with his extended family. Worse, because of the uncertainty of Dan’s next assignment, she’s had to turn down a job with a private school that would have accepted Isabel. Instead of facing his marital difficulties, Dan brings his comrade Gus (whose wife, by walking out, has done what Alexa can only fantasize about) home to live until Gus weathers his rough patch. When Isabel goes AWOL from school and returns home, Dan and Alexa must confront the unstable core of their military family. Dan has apparently been affected by the horrors of battle, but aside from ducking at the sound of a woodpecker and talking in his sleep, this has to be one of the more muted descriptions of post-traumatic stress in modern post-warfare fiction. Trollope is less than sure-handed in her handling of this subject matter, preferring to prevaricate with endless and repetitive dialogue and rumination about the challenges of re-entering the democratic society and domestic tranquility soldiers are sworn to protect. The couple's emotional reckoning is more thoroughly articulated later, but the tedium of getting to that point is daunting.
Eminently skimmable.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7251-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
