Deeply emotional and satisfying.
A story of love, drugs, and hope.
In Anastasia, Florida, Olney Kartheizer had been a doting father to his son, Cully, and a devoted husband to Kat, who eventually leaves him. The lad was a star athlete who could pitch with either hand and write in Spanish with one hand while writing in English with the other. One day, he tells Olney he’s quitting sports because “fun will only get you so far.” Cully has some minor but painful accidents that lead to his use of OxyContin—or does the Oxy lead to the accidents? We never know, but the addictive poison wedges itself between father and son. Cully keeps asking his dad for money for one thing or another to “turn his life around,” and Olney is increasingly reluctant to give it. Cully tells his father he doesn’t need his approval and is “uncomfortable with constant parental proximity, preferring, himself, the bliss of distance.” Cully says he wishes his dad would treat him like a human being who has feelings, but Olney seems to be doing his best. Then Cully disappears, Olney looks for him and finally finds him—but not for long. The young man is on a self-destructive path, even getting fired from jobs such as sign twirling. His sometime girlfriend aptly calls him an “oxy moron,” one of the many examples of clever wordplay that help lighten the story. Olney, who doesn’t believe in God but likes to watch religious programs on TV, by chance meets Mireille Tighe, who is sweet, funny, and dying. Her throat is constricting from dysphagia, and soon she’ll be unable to swallow. “I intend to get to know you,” he tells her. “Better hurry up,” she replies. Readers will feel worse for this lovely woman than she does for herself, adding a layer of emotion atop the tale of filial loss. Olney could be any single father, any ordinary man who loves his child. But he spends a lot of time daydreaming about the past because that’s where he left his son. Meanwhile, does Olney love Cully only for who he was and not for who he is? Or is the love unconditional, as it may seem to the reader? Cully keeps leaving without a trace, and Olney keeps looking. And hoping.
Deeply emotional and satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781324035732
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
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
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