Osborn's (The Paper Chase, 2004, etc.) fly-on-the-wall approach offers a certain voyeuristic pleasure but seems primarily...
Nine months in marriage counseling with a 30-something California couple.
"This isn't a marriage where someone is beating the other one up. Or where someone is gambling away everything the family owns, or someone can't hold a job because they're drunk or high. As a matter of fact, this is a marriage that, in material terms, has been very successful." Nonetheless, Steve, a boyishly handsome, successful partner at a private equity firm, has been cheating on Gretchen, “a beautiful, smart ice princess" and a tenured English professor. By the time the two arrive in therapy with a counselor named Sandy, Gretchen has already begun her own affair, rented an apartment, taken the kids and moved out. In dialogue-heavy chapters set entirely in Sandy's office, narrated from her therapeutic point of view, their troubles and habitual communication problems are revealed, diagnosed, and discussed at length. "I want you to try an exercise," Sandy tells Steve. "When Gretchen says something, I want you to imagine she means the opposite of what she is saying." While Gretchen perceives Sandy as siding with Steve, who really just wants to be forgiven and get back together, Sandy explains that she sides with the marriage, as personified by an empty green chair that doesn't match anything else in the office. "I keep that chair in the office to remind me that I speak for the marriage," Sandy tells Gretchen. "Sandy, you are sounding delusional," Gretchen replies. "You're going to tell me what my nonexistent marriage is saying from a chair it isn't in?" Will Sandy's methods work? Will Steve and Gretchen give up their extramarital liaisons and reconnect with their love? What is that chair really saying?
Osborn's (The Paper Chase, 2004, etc.) fly-on-the-wall approach offers a certain voyeuristic pleasure but seems primarily designed for didactic effect.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-19202-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
IN THE NEWS
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
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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